On this episode, biochemist Momo and AI expert Guru explore the concept of personalized nutrition, arguing that no food is universally healthy and that individual microbiome differences determine how each person responds to even widely celebrated "superfoods."
Transcript:
Guru:
Okay, Momo, let's play a game. Welcome to the Precision Diner. And today's special is the ultimate influencer lunch, which is a big spinach salad with some nice sliced almonds on top, a side of roasted broccoli and a tall glass of artisanal kombucha. Man, I think I have a little bit of warring happening in my mouth when I think about a meal like this, okay? But this meal may not be the best for everybody. I'm going to give you the molecular results of a Viome test from three different customers who walk into Precision Diner. And of course, this test is based on their RNA activity in their gut and so forth. Your job as the resident biochemist is to debug this menu so we don't accidentally harm them and make sure that they're healthy and only eat the things that are good for them. Okay? Hey Momo, true or false? You need to have an advanced degree to improve your health.
Momo:
Love this game. Happy to play it. I've got my lab coat on, so bring on the data.
Guru:
Awesome. So here's customer one. This person's Viome test shows that their microbiome has very high hydrogen sulfide production. So their gut is basically like a sulfur refinery. What are we going to do to their plate?False.
Momo:
All right. So first of all, the broccoli has to go immediately, and that's because cruciferous vegetables, which broccoli belongs to, are packed with compounds called glucosinolates. So these are molecules that have sulfur in them. And many of the gut microbiome bacteria will actually convert those glucosinolates into a biological gas bomb, which is hydrogen sulfide that can cause rapid emptying of their intestines. So we're going to swap broccoli with asparagus. Asparagus has a similar fiber content, similar micronutrient content, but we prevent that sulfide producing bacteria from too much party. All right, so that's one customer, no broccoli. Next one.
Guru:
Okay. Customer number two also has Viome test results, but in this case, it shows a severe inability to process oxalates. Their pathways are clogged and the data is basically showing that they may even have some joint pain and kidney stress and so forth. What would you do?Your genetics are the most important thing for your health.
Momo:
Yeah, so unfortunately they're going to have to remove spinach from their salad, and that's because spinach and almonds as well have some of the highest oxalate content of all foods. And so because they're both rich in oxalates, they're going to have to basically give those two foods away to someone else. And for these kind of people, eating that salad is like swallowing microscopic shards of glass. These oxalates can make crystals that can damage joints and kidneys and cause kidney stones. So we're going to swap those two, and we're going to swap spinach for arugula. And arugula is a great base for a salad. And then we're going to swap almonds with pumpkin seeds, and pumpkin seeds are packed with very healthy oils and very healthy protein, including some very healthy amino acids. And they'll have a very similar texture, crunch, and very similar vitamin profile with zero oxalates essentially that will not have any negative effects on joints and kidneys.
Guru:
Ooh, that still sounds super tasty. It does. I have this arugula salad.False.
Momo:
Yes.
Guru:
And last one. Okay, customer number three. For this person, the vial results show a spike in their immune system activation. Their system is highly inflamed and it's showing some kind of a histamine overload. So what would you do for somebody like that? Okay, let's try this. Both cardio and weight training are important for your health span.
Momo:
Yeah. For those people, they're going to have to skip the kombucha. Fermented foods are great for some people, but if they're high histamines. And so giving kombucha to an inflamed histamine sensitive gut is basically like pouring fuel on a fire. And so the swap is that instead of drinking that fermented tea, which is kombucha, they should be drinking iced peppermint or mint tea or ginger tea to actually soothe the GI tract unless they have other sensitivities to these specific foods.
Guru:
Exactly. So that's literally the point of this episode. We can take the healthiest meal on the internet and how we cannot really serve it as is to three different people with three different individual biologies. That can be a disaster for them. Turns out that if you run that meal with the spinach and almonds and the broccoli and kombucha through our algorithm based on that microbiome data, about 20% of the population would just not be able to eat it because of one of these problems that you just mentioned. So the point is there's no such thing as a universally healthy food. There's only food that matches your individual biology or it doesn't match your individual biology. So today we're going to teach you how to stop eating like this average human and start eating like a precise, individually fine-tuned biology that is you.Yes, true. Hey Guru, I have some true or false questions for you. If your blood tests are normal, you're healthy.
Momo:
That is great, Guru. Okay. I'm Momo, a biochemist.
Guru:
And I'm Guru, an AI expert. We're two PhDs on a FOD. All right, Mo, let's get on with the next section. What's on your radar right now? No way, false.
Momo:
Ooh, okay. I have a lot of things going on on my radar, but I'll just highlight a couple. So last week I was at the Precision Medicine World Congress. It's a big conference in Santa Clara, California, and I really, really enjoyed all three days. These are top scientists. This is one of the best conferences in that they bring literally the top scientists in the world, including some Nobel Prize laureates typically, including this year. And there are many, many takeaways. I can spend an hour reviewing all of the great science that was presented. There was a lot of oncology focused. There was a lot of longevity focus and a lot of multi-omics focus. I'd just like to highlight two characters from that conference that I really liked. One was David Sinclair, whose company has a FDA green light to enter human clinical trials to reverse aging.
And so that's really, really important. And then Michael Snyder from Stanford, who presented his great platform for multiomic profiling on human beings and identifying very, very early signs far, far before any symptoms would set in of multiple chronic diseases that point to this need for basically digitizing the human body and finding biomarkers well before any symptoms onset. And that's of course what we are focused at Viome. So it's basically the same wavelength. And we're going to have Michael Snyder on our podcast in one of the future episodes. So that's sort of on the professional side. On the fun side, I just recently made over the weekend my favorite crepes. And for the audience members who've never tried these kinds of crepes, I am absolutely crazy over them. And so I make crepes with soy milk because I cannot have dairy, but they taste just like normal crepes.
And then the filling is the key. The filling is basically melted sugar and the sugar just melts from the heat of crepes. And then it is ground up walnuts and then whipped cream. And because I cannot have dairy, I use cocoa whip, which I think it's even better than the normal whipped cream. And so you just fill the crepe with a little bit of sugar, quite a lot of walnuts and a lot of whipped cream and folded into a very large cylinder. And that's just one of my favorite desserts. So maybe we'll be making those on one of the future episodes.
Guru:
I'll tell you what's on my radar related to foods, I showed you one of the really neat features of the Viome app, which is that you get personalized recipes on your app based on your individual superfoods and your avoid foods are of course not included in any of the recipes, but overall you get a collection of, I think, up to 3,000 recipes that are going to be ranked based on your specific food recommendations. So you can pick and choose which ones you like, and it'll tell you which foods are your superfoods, which are your enjoy foods, and it'll not include the things that are either minimize or avoid as much as possible, but sometimes if it does, it'll kind of take the score down a little bit. And so you'll know what's going on with each of the recipes. But the recipes have been tested by chefs and it's been shown to be very tasty in addition to being the right individually appropriate thing for you. AI and machine learning always produce trustworthy data.
Momo:
I love this feature, Guru. I absolutely love it. It's a feature that a lot of our customers are going to use, and I tested it. And it's not only what you said that there are plenty of recipes, there's a plenty of variety of recipes, and that they give you a score, but also that there are filters built in so that you can actually filter those 3,000 recipes into subcategories based on how you feel today or your dietary preferences. So for example, you can apply a vegan filter, and we currently have 140 curated vegan recipes. So you can be cooking for many, many meals, a variety of vegan foods, and that's really impressive and they all taste great. So congratulations on that.
Guru:
Yeah, that's a great feature. And I have to thank the people on our team who came up with that idea and implemented it in a very quick timeframe. On my personal side, I am super excited about a new movie that's coming out. It's actually one of my favorite all- time favorite sci-fi books. It's called Project Hailmary. I read that book several years ago when it first was written by Andy Weir, but I love that book because it has aliens in it, but those aliens are all biologically plausible aliens and it's actually mind-boggling how well-written the book is. So first of all, since you're a microbiologist, I just mentioned that there is a new kind of a microbial organism, a single cell organism called Astrophage, in that book. It's super amazing. It actually can convert energy into mass and store it in its nucleus. And also it actually has the same type of biology. It has a nucleus, it has all the organelles, including mitochondria and all of that stuff. So it's so great to see how Andy Weir develops that concept. And that book has now been turned into a movie with Gosling, and I am so looking forward to seeing it next week. And this is a really, really exciting thing. Oh, by the way, one of my friends just gave me a Lego set, which is to build the project Hail Mary Ship, which I'm super excited about building this weekend along with my daughter. False.
Momo:
That is super geeky, first of all. Second of all, I am actually not a big movie goer, especially not going to the movie theaters, but because you've hyped this movie up so much, I'm actually going to go to the movie theater and watch this one because I trust you. And it's interesting that they named this microorganism a phage because current phages, as we know them, have essentially none of those features. They can of course not store energy into mass and they don't have mitochondria and they don't have all those things. So it's a sci-fi thing, but hey, in the future and on a different planet, this is a different world. You could have phages that have all those features and they can still infect bacteria.
Guru:
Exactly. It's not actually infecting stars. So anyway, it's super fun, super fun. You should definitely watch it. Amazing. But let me come back to something you said at the end of the last episode. You said that you're going to create a super quick, tasty and healthy desert recipe, and you said that you'd show us how to make it. Do you have that? Oats are unhealthy for some people.
Momo:
I do. I made that dessert, yes. So I made it last night, and it just took a few minutes to make it. We're going to roll the video now, and it's a super nutritious, super delicious dessert that has about 18 grams of protein per serving, a dessert with 18 grams of protein per serving, and it's a vegan protein. Hey, everyone. I'm going to show you right now how to make a very quick, very nutritious and very delicious dessert. And this is going to be a chocolate pudding made with tofu. So it's also going to be vegan for those who are either dairy intolerant or poor vegans. We're going to have very few ingredients. I have here 14 ounces or 400 grams of firm tofu, organic, of course. We have some unprocessed cocoa powder, so that's not Dutch processed, which destroys some of the antioxidants. We have a sweetener of choice, which is maple syrup, but you can choose pretty much any sweetener you like, and we have vanilla.
That's it. Those are all the ingredients. So here, I've taken out the tofu from its watery container, and then we're going to dump it in here.
And then the rest of the recipe is going to be very subjective. It's going to be however you like it. If you like dark chocolate, for example, like I do, you're going to want to add a lot more cocoa. If you like milk chocolate, you don't want to add a lot of cocoa because it's going to be kind of bitter. So we're going to add some cocoa for now and you are going to adjust your sweetness however you like. So I'm going to add a little bit of maple syrup and you can add whatever you'd like. And then vanilla is a very subjective thing. Again, it's based on your likes and dislikes. And I'm just going to add about half a teaspoon, so about two and a half mils or so, I think, of vanilla.
Well, that's it. Those are the ingredients. We are now going to start blending this and see how it goes, and we may need to add a little bit more of water if the texture is not right. You want to use a very powerful blender if you can. This is a Vitamix, which I love, but there's many others, I'm sure. Now I'm just going to bring everything down because it's splattered all over the sides and the thickness looks good, but we may need to add a little bit more water because it'll thicken a little bit as it sits in the fridge as well, but it's always easy to add water. It's once you add too much water, then it's very difficult to restore.
Okay? So you can try it here the first time. I like a little bit darker, so I'm going to add a little bit more of that. I like it a little bit sweeter. Again, just completely, you adjust that based on your likes and dislikes. And now we're going to go back to ... Okay, that's it. We're ready to serve. The dessert is ready. Voyla, that's a vegan chocolate pudding with tofu, very high protein content and super creamy and super tasty. And you can adjust the amount of chocolate or the chocolate flavor and the amount of sugar and the tightened sugar and the amount of vanilla. Everything is fully adjustable.
Guru:
Momo, that looks amazing. You need to pit that for me when I'm in Seattle, man. This could be one of my favorite desserts. That is true.
Momo:
I hope you love it. Yeah. I mean, it's super creamy. You're going to fine tune the taste to be exactly the way you like it. So we're going to experiment with you. When you come to my house, we're going to make it the way you like it because maybe you'll like it more chocolate or less chocolatey. Maybe you'll like it less sweet or more sweet. Maybe you like it thinner or thicker. We'll figure it out.
Guru:
I already thought of one modification I want to make, which is I will probably put some cardamom in there. Yeah, I agree. So if you take 100 people and feed them the exact same healthy bowl of oats, some will get a steady burn of energy, and others will experience a crazy blood glucose spike like they ate a candy bar. And as a biochemist, I know why that happens. That's because biology is complex and highly individual, and our body is a representation of 100,000 chemical reactions that are different in different people. So we will have different responses to the same oatmeal.
Momo:
Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, I love cardamum, but not in desserts. So I guess, yeah, we can personalize this dessert for you.
Guru:
There's lots of Indian desserts which have cardamom in them, so I'm going to try that. So you said something during that video. You said that this is tasty and healthy. Yep.
This dessert definitely looks like it could be. I wonder though whether it's going to be healthy for everyone. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, for the last hundred years, medicine has tried to solve that kind of chaos and variance by taking the average. You know what, nobody's really average, and no food is average, right? So I'm an AI and data science expert, and in my world, if you take a complex system and treat it like an average, the system just doesn't work.
Momo:
Yep. Yep. It's a good
Guru:
Question. And that is the main topic of this episode. Is there such a thing as a universally healthy food? So let's see the ingredients. You had tofu in there.Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are a few average people, but you can't just count on being the average. That's extremely unlikely to happen.
Guru:
Which is really healthy generally, but I think it may not be super healthy for everybody. That's right. And we want to talk about that. And then there's cocoa, there's maple syrup, there's vanilla. Those are small components which may not make a huge difference, but-
Momo:
Well, but cocoa has very important antioxidants. When it's not processed, cocoa has very important antioxidants, so it's very healthy again, generally. And there are now randomized controlled trials showing the dark chocolate, but not milk chocolate due to the higher cocoa concentration actually has many health benefits. But again, for the average human.: Exactly.
Guru:
I love dark chocolate, so I think I'm going to read up on all those benefits and maybe take advantage of them, okay? But let's talk about all of these foods with two people we want to bring on to this podcast who are clinical nutrition experts, Dr. Grant, Antoine, and Janelle Tunnell. Let's bring them on and talk to them about this dessert.
Momo:
Woo-hoo. I'm Momo.
Guru:
Okay. Let's talk about these foods with our two special guests and clinical nutrition experts that have joined us, Dr. Grant, Antoine, and Janelle Connell. Grant and Janelle are leaders in our clinical nutrition team at Bio. Welcome to the episode, Grant and Janelle.
Janelle:
Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. I'm Guru, and we are two PhDs on a pod. All right, let's go. Yes, we have two P's in a pod, but we also have HDs, right? So we look at biology in high definition, or we think about AI and its high dimensionality, or we think about the health span, and are we driven by that? All of those things are why we are–two PhDs on a pod.
Grant:
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Guru:
Hey there. All right, I'm going to jump right into it. Okay? Momo just showed us a really tasty looking dessert that he prepared. It does look great and yummy, but it has tofu as the main ingredient. And I'm not sure that tofu can be a great healthy food for everybody in our audience.two PhDs on a pod.
Grant:
Yeah. So mostly fermentation is a good, healthy process for us. We don't do it. Again, these microbes in our gut do it for us thinking about fibers. We can't break down some of these fibers. We rely on those microbes again to do the work, but when they do that, they actually, they produce beneficial molecules and nutrients for us that then we use both in the gut and throughout the body. And they're really important signaling molecules. So typically fermentation is a good thing, but if we have a dysbiotic picture, maybe we have IBS symptoms, folks can be really sensitive to that fermentation and that gas that's produced and it can irritate the gut lining and cause symptoms. So the low FODMAP diet and all FODMAP stands for, they're just basically fermentable carbohydrates. And let me see if I can do this. Fermentable, oligo, dye and polyols, right?
Polyols, which are just a bunch of hydroxides on carbohydrates. But anyway, microbes can take those carbohydrates, ferment them and produce gas. So if you're sensitive to that gas, we pull back. And actually there's a lot of evidence for the low FODMAP diet, at least initially for helping to improve IBS symptoms. So we don't want to do that for the long term. Remember that those fermentable carbohydrates, they're beneficial for us. But if we want to have an impact on someone's day-to-day upfront, we'll pull back on those FODMAPs, reduce their pain and discomfort, and then we'll work on supporting the microbiome and the gut to where we can slowly reintroduce those foods to get the benefits.
Guru:
Grant, that's super interesting. And Momo, as a biochemist, I wanted to ask you, I'm the non-biologist here, so I'm going to ask you, what is this process of fermentation? What is the microbiome doing to your food that we call fermentation?
Momo:
Yeah, let me just add a little more information here. Thank you, Grant, for all those explanations. So tofu is a complex food in that there are two different varieties of tofu. There is the normal tofu that you buy at the grocery store, and that one is not fermented. There is a fermented version, but that is typically not found in the United States, and it's called stinky tofu. And that's probably the main reason it's not found in the United States because Americans wouldn't buy it. But I actually tried it in Taiwan and it was absolutely delicious. There's also something called bean curd, which is basically fermented tofu that mimics blue cheese. It actually tastes very similar to blue cheese. So if you're lactose-free or dairy-free and you want to taste something that tastes like blue cheese, you can go for that and find it at local Asian stores.
So fermentation can happen upfront, meaning during food preparation, and fermentation can also happen inside the intestines. And so fermentation basically means that microbes are feeding on a food in the absence of oxygen. And so when they're doing that, they're producing specific gases and specific molecules that in some cases may be beneficial to us and in other cases may be harmful to us.
Guru:
So Romel, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no oxygen in your gut, correct?Yeah, and I bring the power of the computational and data elements that currently is such a widespread and easily available resource, right? And you need that resource to make sense out of that data that comes out of biology, because when you talk about a hundred thousand reactions, that really results in tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of data points that we need to make sense out of. And there's no human that can do that. You need AI and algorithms to be able to do that, right? So if you put your expertise and my expertise together, biology sets the table, and AI serves the meal.
Momo:
That's a normal state. So a healthy state in the large intestine. So in the colon, there is no oxygen, and that's where we support fermentation of microbes. But in the small intestine, there is oxygen, and there's very few microbes there for various other reasons as well, mostly because of bile acids being very highly antimicrobial.
Guru:
Got it. Got it. So Grant, thank you. That's super helpful for us to know. So I always thought that tofu is great for everybody and it has so much good profile of proteins and it tastes great for me. And you can make it in such a flexible way in so many different ways, in so many different dishes. But really, there's a bunch of things that you need to watch out for.A tasty dish.
Grant:
That's right. I mean, really you just need to test. You need to test to know your own microbiome, what it's capable of, where your imbalances are, and then now you can make personalized food choices based off that information, right?
Guru:
Perfect. Yeah, that's pretty much the key takeaway. So for anyone listening to us, do you know whether you are on the left side of that chart or the right side of the chart? Actually, it's very difficult to know unless you test. So that's the reason why it makes sense to test your microbiome and see what's the activity and the functions that are going on. So let me move on to the next topic, and I want to bring up an endless debate that happens online about whether meat and specifically red meat is a superfood or it is a heart attack fuel, let's call it that. So Janelle, when I look at the population data, again, that same 50,000 people that we've made recommendations to in Viome, I see that the data is a little bit of a mess because it's definitely not what I expected it to be.
So let me show you that data. Okay.
So look, this profile looks like about a little more than a half of the people can actually enjoy or even maybe consider lean beef as a superfood, which is great news for a lot of people because they love eating beef. But then a little less than half of the people should really watch out because that red segment over there, which is just a little less than a quarter, they may have cardiovascular risk because of the contents, the ingredients of red meat. And then another little less than a quarter may have some kind of digestive disruption. So explain to us, Janelle, what's going on over here with lean beef?Yeah, that's what we want to serve on this podcast, right? So let me just get started with a little bit about yourself, Momo. Tell us what was your journey in life that brought you here?
Janelle:
Yeah, I love that you have this graph because I think it actually really highlights the controversy. So for a long time, red meat in particular was kind of villainized and we are staying away from it because of heart disease risk. And I would say more recently we've seen kind of a comeback even now in the USDA guidelines, it's highlighted a little bit more, but the truth is that it's really nuanced, right? It's not in the green zone for everyone, and it's important to understand where it lands for you. There's benefits, and I always say this with anyone I work with, that every whole food has a benefit, but it's not always beneficial for you maybe at this moment. So we're going to get not only protein from beef, but we're getting beef vitamins that help with our energy. We're getting things like CoQ10, which again is really important in producing energy for our cells.
So there definitely are benefits to consuming it. There's also some downsides. And I would say similar to us, it comes from an animal and that animal is what it eats. We are what we eat as well. So we want to think about that when we're choosing beef or even eggs I would put into that category. Things that are going to be more like pasture rays, grass-fed, organic, things like that are going to have different nutrient profiles than conventional. So think about that. We want things with more omega-3 content and just better quality when possible. But I'm really glad that MoMO highlighted what's happening in the gut because that's part of the picture here with beef. Beef is really rich in a nutrient called carnitine. And what can happen in our gut is those bacteria take that carnitine and they can metabolize it into something called TMA.
It's trimethylamine. TMA then goes to our liver and it's converted to TMAO. And what we see in the research is that TMAO is associated with heart disease risk and arterial plaques. So we want to be really mindful of that. But the nuance here is that some people's gut produce a lot more TMA than other people do. They might eat the exact same amount of meat, but someone's going to produce more than the other person. And that's really just dependent on the composition of their microbiome.
Guru:
Now let me ask you, is the TMA going into the liver involve crossing the gut barrier? And is this because of leaky gut also, or is this independent of leaky gut? This is just a normal process that happens from your gut to your bloodstream. All right, let's talk about that a little bit. So I grew up in Yugoslavia, that country no longer exists. And then I moved to the United States and went to college here and got my PhD at the University of Utah. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. And then the most important part of my career, I would say, is that I spent about 10 years in academia, 10 years as a government scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and now 10 years at Viome as an entrepreneur.
Janelle:
Yeah, good question. More things get through when we have leaky gut all the way around, but this is part of a normal process. And we're always going to have some TMA produced, but when we're having excess amounts is really when it gets harmful. And I would say that's kind of across the board in our gut. You highlighted methane gas on there, and it's the same. Our guts are going to produce some gas. Those microbes are going to ferment things. We're going to make gas from it, but when it becomes harmful is when we're producing too much. So same story there. If we have this imbalance of microbes in our gut, that carnitine from the red meat can be converted into methane gas by certain microbes with antigens, and some people just have more of those and more active ones than other people. Now, the problem with that is it's going to say that methane gas is going to slow down our digestion, our muscles that can tract along the way to move food Food through the digestive tract, methane gas will actually slow that down.
And then food sits in our system longer. We might feel bloated, we might feel constipated, but it also leaves more time for potentially harmful metabolites to sit on that gut lining and cause some damage and get through. So it's a double-edged sword and you want to know what your gut is doing with those nutrients and things like red meat to say, "Hey, how often should I really be having this in my diet? Is it helping me or is it more harmful for me?
Guru:
Yeah, that's a great description. Thank you. And I have to ask you also about the portions that people eat. Actually, going back to the tofu as well as the beef, when something is not great with your gut, meaning that you cannot process it the way you would want it to, does it mean that you can still eat smaller portions or do you kind of need to stop for a little bit, let your gut rewild and recover from whatever issues it's having and then start eating? What is your recommendation for that?
Janelle:
Yeah, that's a good question. So generally with some of these things, we'll recommend trying to avoid it as much as possible, but we have to know some of these nutrients, Grant brought up oxalates. They're in a lot of different foods. We're not going to be able to avoid all of those foods. Carnitine is in a number of different foods. So being mindful of just those foods that are highest in that thing that's harming your gut, and we're going to pull back on those, maybe avoid them, minimize, reduce portions when you do have them is going to be the strategy and then see how the gut response. Can we heal it over time and then reintroduce those foods again?
Guru:
Makes sense to me. So I think you guys both mentioned a number of scientific principles in your description. So if there are good papers that can support some of these points, we will definitely put those up in the show notes down below. So you'll have links to those papers and you can look them up and read this on your own.
Momo:
I'd like to comment on this topic.
Guru:
Go for it.
Momo:
Yeah. So I have two topics to discuss here that are related to beef. One is that as you can see from your pie chart, it's very obvious that some people benefit from beef and other people can be harmed in various ways. And when people read the literature, the general nutritional literature and ask the question, "Is beef good for me or not? " All of those papers and all of the studies and trials are going to ask one question, which is, is beef good for all people or is it bad for all people? And when the reality is that it's good for some and bad for others, what is going to drive their result is going to be which people they actually pull into their trial. If they by chance pull in more people that benefit from beef, then their trial is going to show beef is good for humanity.
But if another trial pulls in more people for whom beef is bad, they're going to come out with a completely different result. And at Viome, we completely break those barriers and we know that different people will react differently to beef, and therefore we actually know by testing who's going to react positively and who's going to react negatively. So those are very important takeaways for people to understand is this applies not just to beef. It applies to tofu like we discussed, but it also applies to almost every food. And we're going to highlight many of those over our podcasts, but that is a key differentiator between Viome and most of the other nutritional community that we understand different responses. So that's one thing I wanted to mention. The other thing I wanted to mention was Janelle alluded to this that some TMA is not that bad for your health.
In fact, there are studies that showed that some TMA is actually healthy. It's only when there's too much of it produced that it's bad for you. And so here we have a very typical example where these molecules that are produced by the gut microbiome can actually support a healthy physiology, but if they're overproduced, then they're obviously going to harm us or they may harm us. And so going back to this minimize or eliminate, in this particular case, I would say that minimizing is probably a better choice unless the production of TMA is absolutely huge. And that can be all quantified using our Viome test and that can be very precisely determined. And that's why we have two different food categories, minimize and avoid so that computer algorithms can actually make that determination instead of someone trying to guess.
Guru:
Great points, Momo. Thank you. And again, going back to your first point about some significant proportion of the people having benefits and the rest of the people having detrimental effects. That is the problem we mentioned also in the previous episode, which is that you don't want to look at the averages for a population because that average may not apply. In this case, for lean beef, it might just turn out to be no effect. So you do keep doing what you're doing, but it turns out that for half the people it's bad. For other people, it's good. So you need to know what your specific physiology looks like, And then determine what your diet is based on that. So that's our key point throughout over and over. So moving on to the next topic, I wanted to bring up another set of data for the Viome population and a question related to that. So I pulled up here a number of the foods that are commonly discussed about whether it's good or bad for you. We already talked about lead beef, but I also brought up here broccoli, black beans, turmeric, cashews, tuna, et cetera. All of them have this good for some people, not good for some people type of a profile. And I wanted to particularly pick up on turmeric, which is a generally known good food, but it turns out 33% of the violent population is recommended to minimize or avoid turmeric. So happens, I was one of them. So I'm from India, so I use turmeric in many of the dishes.
So it was a pretty big hit for me, but maybe I was overdoing it. So Grant, was I overdoing it and are other people overdoing it? That's why it should be minimized or is there something else going on here? Man, you've done a lot of things, and I want to actually dive into many of those things later on. So I came from India. I was in India until my bachelor's degree, and then I came here to the United States to get my graduate degrees, and I got a PhD in computer science, where at the time we focused on large-scale distributed systems that process huge amounts of data.
Grant:
Well, likely you weren't overdoing it, but maybe your microbes were. Let me explain. So turmeric, it's actually, it's an herb and it's a Cologog, meaning it produces or stimulates the production of more bile in the liver and more release of bile into the gut. So produces stronger contractions of the gallbladder. So when you eat your food and your body detects fat in that food, it will tell the gallbladder to contract, to release those bile acids to help come in as a detergent, to help you digest and metabolize those fatty acids that are in the food. Normal process, turmeric supports that. And a lot of times we can use that medicinally to support gallbladder flow for folks that have a history of gallstones and inflammation of the gallbladder. But on the flip side, as we're releasing those bile acids, the microbiome can actually take those bile acids and metabolize them as well.
And it turns out that these bile acids are very important signaling molecules for our bodies. They trigger immune responses, they trigger metabolic responses, actually changing our gene expression in the liver and how we respond and control both blood sugar and blood fats, blood cholesterol, and the microbes in our gut play a huge role in influencing how those signals are received by our body. At Viome, we have a bile acid metabolism score that'll actually look at those factors influencing that metabolism and whether the overall balance is a net benefit or net harm based off the score and that microbiome activity. So those microbes are going to take those bile acids that are released and convert them into other types of molecules that then have either deleterious effects or positive effects. So if we're taking turmeric, it's going to increase the amount of bile that's being released.
So if we already have an overproduction of these negative bile acids, these secondary bile acids, we call them, then we're just adding gas to the fire. We're just adding more flame to that inflammation and those downstream immune and metabolic processes. So if we pick up on that activity, we want to pull back on turmeric. We can bring other foods in to help influence this activity as well. And it's really like all biology, it's really a Goldilocks. Momo just mentioned with TMA, a little bit is good, and bile acid certainly a little bit is good. And some specific bile acids are more beneficial than others which are more harmful. So coming in and being able to modulate that and balance it, we've been able to do that with intermittent fasting. It's been shown through influencing circadian rhythms. We can do it with other foods. Capsaicin is one.
It actually blocks the enzymes that bacteria use to do the work to do that conversion and it's shown to lower those negative bile acids in blood. And that's important because whether it's controlling our metabolism, protecting our liver, protecting our colon, because these are also genotoxic, some of these bile acids are, we want to be checking in on this microbiome activity to make sure the net result is a benefit and not at harm. And so we can pull back on that microbiome activity, bring us back into that Goldilocks zone so we get the majority of benefit and that's going to support our health for the long-term.
Guru:
Makes sense to me. Momo, any questions before we move on to the next topic?
Momo:
No, I think this was very well done. Turmeric is such a super food, but not for everyone. Sorry you are not able to eat it.
Guru:
Well, I'm actually back from that. I actually cut it down and then I test it again and we'll talk about that benefit of testing again and so forth. And now I've bounced back. I can bring back turmeric in my life. That's the beauty of it.
Grant:
Yeah.
Grant:
These aren't forever recommendations. It's very important for folks to realize these aren't allergies or sensitivities. This is microbiome activity that we're trying to improve and we can. Yeah, so not a forever recommendation at all. We'll get you back.
Guru:
I'll just mention again that for the key scientific papers, we are going to post them down below in the show notes. You can always look it up, read, ask questions in the comments, and we'll be happy to answer questions from the audience anytime you want.
Momo:
Yeah. Let's talk about wheat, a highly controversial food. So Janelle, would you like to discuss benefits and harms of wheat, please?
Janelle:
Yeah. I'm glad we're throwing this one in the mix because I actually think this is probably one of the most villainized foods out there. So many people are on the gluten-free bandwagon who maybe don't need to be, right? And we need to think about that. Momo said to us earlier that wheat is like taking a multivitamin if you're having whole wheat, and there's some truth to that. It's got a lot of B vitamins, it's got a lot of different minerals in there, but you're also going to get some things like antioxidants, antioxidants that are good for your vision that we don't always think of when we think of having a whole wheat bread. So there's so many benefits. And I always want to highlight too the fiber content. I think that fiber is maybe not sexy to people, but like to us here at Viome, fiber's very sexy and your microbes love it and it's got so many good benefits for you.
So wheat is a superfood in that sense. Now there obviously are people who have celiac disease or who have gluten sensitivity and don't react well to wheat or to other grains that have gluten in them. And for those people, of course, it should be avoided because it's causing a reaction for them. The other group of people that I'm mindful of when we think about wheat is people that we look at and see that they have a leaky gut. And now our gut is lined with cells and we like them to be really tight and close together and be a good barrier. They're like our wall of defense, like from the outside world coming in. We want to be able to regulate what's coming into our body and not allow everything in there. Unfortunately, due to a number of things, it can be our diet, stress, a number of things that impact our body can cause those cells to kind of loosen.
And we call that leaky gut because then things can pass through our gut lining and our body gets an immune response to them and we can experience that in a lot of different ways. There's some evidence that shows that a certain protein in gluten grains can cause some of that gap in those tight junctions of our cells. And so if you have leaky gut, we might want to be careful. We want to reduce gluten and whole wheat for a period of time and see if we can strengthen that gut lining up a little bit and then reintroduce it slowly and look at that response. I'll say though that there's a number of things that can help our gut lining. So just being mindful of gluten is not the only piece. Like Grant was saying, we can introduce things and different types of fiber are so important because our microbes can use those to produce butyrate.
Butyrate strengthens our gut lining, and so we can attack it from different angles if that is an issue. But again, it's not an issue for everyone. For some people, maybe we're going to be a little bit careful of it. For other people, wheat has so many nutrients and so much value that we want to include that in the diet. Now, with wheat, be really careful about what you're choosing, right? It needs to be whole grain and flip over those food labels, look at the ingredient list. If it just says wheat, it is not whole wheat. It's got to say whole wheat or a hundred percent whole wheat. Look at the fiber content. You should see two to three grams of fiber per serving-ish.
Grant:
And multi-grain is not whole wheat. I just want to say as well. Yeah.
Janelle:
Yeah. Yeah.
Grant:
Sure. They try to trick you, right? They try, oh, it's multi-grain. It's not necessarily a whole grain.
Janelle:
Not necessarily whole grains. And sometimes there are. So there's that fancy stamp now, that whole grain stamp that will be on the front of the labels, and that can even be deceiving too, because the whole grain stamp only has to have half whole grain, 50%. But if the stamp says 100%, then it has to be completely whole grain. So you got to look for those little differences in there to make sure you're getting a 100% whole grain product.
Momo:
That is amazing. I wasn't aware of that. When is that being rolled out?
Janelle:
That's out now. You can see that on the front of food packaging.
Momo:
Okay. That's great. That's super helpful because the vast majority of breads you find at the grocery store, they will have names such as whole grain bread or multi-grain like Grant was saying. But then you look at the ingredients list and whole wheat is like eighth ingredient down the list. And so that's not really helpful. What you want is you want the word whole wheat to be the first ingredient. If it isn't the very first ingredient, then they just basically sprinkle some whole wheat and then they have a reason to call it whole something, but it really isn't. And all the benefits that Janelle outlined earlier are really mostly there in whole wheat. If you strip away the parts of the wheat that have those ingredients and you're eating white wheat, then that's just basically starch. It's like eating rice and the benefits are significantly reduced.
So be careful what wheat you eat. Again, just like going back to carbohydrates, are carbs good for you or bad for you. There are phenomenally healthy carbohydrates and phenomenally unhealthy carbohydrates. So asking the question as are carbs good or bad is not really sensical. And in this case, when we discuss wheat, only when we discuss whole wheat and only for the population that's not sensitive to it, do we really need to consider all the benefits? And even then there is a possibility that some people will not benefit from wheat depending on what kind of microbes they have and what their activities are.
Guru:
Yeah. I wanted to go back to one of the points that came up multiple times in our conversation so far, which is this concept of leaky gut. And I wanted to ask you guys, especially from the clinical practice standpoint, Grant, maybe this is a question for you. Is there an easy way for someone to know whether or not they have leaky gut? And if so, to what extent?
Grant:
I don't know what you mean by easy, but there are tests for intestinal permeability that we can perform clinically. And there's quite a number out there, but the lactolose Manitol test, I'm going to say is the gold standard. You basically ingest these carbohydrates. One of them is normally absorbed through normal digestion. The other one is not. We cannot metabolize that and we do not absorb it. But if there's damage or intestinal permeability where that carbohydrate can get through, now we'll see it in the bloodstream. So you do this ingestion of the carbohydrate, and then we do blood or urinary tests, and we look for the levels of these carbohydrates in the blood. And then that ratio of the two carbohydrates, one being absorbable and non-absorbable, now we have a measure of intestinal permeability. And MoMO knows more about that than I do. We can speak more to that science.
But yeah, definitely we can test. With Viome, we don't do those direct intestinal permeability tests at this time, but we do look at microbiome activities that we know are either harmful or beneficial for the gut lining. And then we get the net sum of all those activities, inflammatory activities, biofilm, chemotaxis, violence pathways. We sum all that activity together and then report on your gutlining health score for you, but it's not a direct measurement of the permeability of that gut lining.Man, so many things, but let's provide a couple of highlights. So on the professional side, we're submitting a scientific paper today, so pretty excited about that. And we're also very, very active on developing two new products for Viome, which is super exciting to go from an idea through all the laboratory development, all the bioinformatics developments, complemented with your teams to go to market with a product that doesn't exist or it's an improvement over the existing products. And then on the personal side, I'm a little sore from some resistance training. So that's pretty exciting. I've been able to do five clean pull-ups, which is a huge accomplishment for me. Yeah, pretty excited about that. Trying to get to 10 eventually, but it'll take probably a year or two. And then spring is here in the Seattle area. My goodness. It's warm. It's—
Momo:
Yeah. I'd like to add some things here.
Yeah. So we talk about gut lining in many contexts, and let's talk about one specific one, which is Akermansium ecinophila. So this is a celebrated gut microbe and people think of the early papers showing metabolic benefits of this bacterium, but what is also now known is that this bacterium degrades the gut lining. It basically consumes, it feeds on the mucins that are protecting our intestinal lining. And so if the bacterium, if we starve Akermansia of fiber, it will resort to consuming mucin and it'll basically strip away that barrier. And so to prevent it from doing that, you want to distract it with fiber. And if you provide it with fiber, then it's going to preferentially feed on the fiber and leave the mucin alone. And so those are some of the things that at Viome, we can measure those biological activities of these microbes and we can identify what biological activities they're performing and we can shift their dietary preferences basically and give them what they want that's beneficial for us and withdraw things that would harm us.
And so those are some of the knobs that we can turn. And going back to what Janelle was saying that fiber is so important, this is just one of many examples where fiber can actually help you rebuild your intestinal barrier, but you have to do it carefully and you have to make sure to provide the right type of fiber for the right microorganisms and right activities.
Guru:
I was going to just put some takeaways clearly in the show for today, unless someone else, any one of you have any other points to make. That is very cool.
Momo:
I want to make a point about the wheat just a little bit more because this is a fascinating subject to me. So wheat, whole wheat is packed with nutrients and it's extremely healthy for a lot of people, but not for everyone. How do you know if you're not going to respond to wheat in a good way? You can do your celiac test, which are available online. You can do your food sensitivity test, which are currently available online from many vendors. And Viome is actually developing its own food sensitivity test because they're very important to complement our normal metatranscriptomic tests. And then you can also look at the Viome Leaky Gut Score and then consider the Viome recommendations as specific to wheat in order to at least test whether wheat might affect your leaky gut or not. So those are sort of practical takeaways, but if none of those harms are in your way, obviously there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who are very healthy and in their 80s and 90s who eat wheat every single meal.
And so it is known to be a very healthy and nutritious food, but of course they're eating whole grain. They're not eating highly processed wheat products that we buy at the store. And I want to provide two takeaways in terms of what I do at home. We actually buy wheat growth. So these are literally wheat grain that you buy from a farmer, and we have that in our house. We buy it at the bulk section of the norm of the local co-op, and then we grind it using Vitamix. So Vitamix comes with an attachment for grinding grains. And so Guru and I will do a cooking show later when we are going to make utapumps, and this is a South Indian delicacy. And when we make dishes, we will literally grind the wheat right there and right before we use it. And we do the same thing for breads and for pancakes and so on.
So that's one really interesting way to do it. Another extremely interesting way to process wheat at home that actually addresses some of these anti-nutrients that people talk about, like phytic acid, is to actually sprout the wheat. And sprouting wheat is super, super simple. And we will show you that in one of the upcoming shows, how I do it. I've been doing that since basically I was a little boy. You sprout the wheat and during the sprouting process, that phytic acid is actually degraded. So even if you're negatively responding to that phytic acid, you can get rid of that by ferment by sprouting wheat. You can also ferment wheat like making sourdough bread, and that'll also get rid of phytic acid. So there are all these little culinary tricks that you can use to derive a maximum benefit from wheat and potentially remove some of the harms.
And just one more announcement that we'll go through making a specialty bread, which is really interesting, where normally breads are made from flour where whole grain is ground, but you can also make bread by simply sprouting wheat. And when it's sprouted, wheat becomes so soft that you can basically turn it into a paste just by mashing it and you can make wheat bread out of that, out of sprouted wheat. And it tastes amazingly well and it's super healthy. It is packed with nutrients and it has a great texture.
Guru:
Awesome. Momo, all those great foods are making my mouth water, especially the utapa. I know my mom is going to be watching this and she's going to be thinking about all the good stuff that she taught me when I was a kid and say, okay, you know what? That's all paying off now.There's lots of sun, lots of dynamic skies. So we're going to go hiking and birding, and then we're going to definitely fit in—
Momo:
Yeah. She may like your Utapam recipe, but she may cringe at mine because I've heavily modified it, but it still
Guru:
Tastes great. No, I think she's also adventurous, so she'll try new things. No problem.Well, you're talking about spring already. I mean, I'm sitting here in something like three feet of snow around my house. And I think there's more coming this weekend, I believe. Well, I'm jealous on the one hand, but actually, to be honest, I don't mind the cold, and I actually love winter sports and stuff like that. So I'm okay.
Momo:
Okay,
Guru:
Great. So listen, folks, I think we've had an amazing discussion for the last 30, 40 minutes, and I wanted to just summarize a couple of takeaways from my perspective, okay? Number one is that there is really no such thing as a universally healthy food. Pretty much every food that you look at, you're going to have a segment of the population for whom it's going to be great or at least no harm. And there's going to be a segment of the population, sometimes small, sometimes larger, for whom there could be some detrimental effects depending on the biology of that individual. And I think today we have discussed a lot of microbiome-related biology, and we have not really spent a lot of time talking about the details of that microbiology, but guess what? Our next episode is in fact going to be about the microbiome. So we are going to get into the details of what is the microbiome?
What does it do? How does it work? What's good about it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's actually a great friend of yours that you cannot live without it, and so you better take care of it. So all of that stuff is going to happen in the next episode. But in this episode, we saw the impact of the microbiome on the foods that you eat. So that's another big takeaway for me. So Momo, if you want to summarize any other takeaways, we can then close.Yeah, I mean, you live in New York, which is perfect for you, and I live in Seattle, which is perfect for me. So there's something for everyone. And I'm definitely gonna fit in some table tennis this weekend, as I do all the time.
Momo:
Yeah, I think just expanding on what you just said about personalizing foods, it's very easy to fall into the trap of finding a paper that describes a study where the food tested is beneficial to humans and justifying you consuming that food or finding another paper that says that that food is bad for humans and justifying not consuming that food based on your personal preferences and whatever beliefs you have. But the reality is that both of those papers might be wrong in that they asked the wrong question, and so they derived wrong answers. The reality is until you test, you really don't know whether that food is good for you or not. And as you age, your microbiome changes, your physiology changes, and what used to be good or bad for you could now flip. And therefore you really need to be testing longitudinally. And that's exactly what we've established as a technology company and as a platform, and really proud of that.
Guru:
Excellent, excellent. So Grant and Janelle, thank you so much. You guys are doing awesome work and your insights and your knowledge about the physiology, about nutrition and about clinical processes of different types. They're helping so many people. So we really thank you for that. And thank you also for joining us for the last hour or so and sharing those thoughts with our audience. Cool. What else?
Grant:
Thank you
Janelle:
Thank You, Guru.
Grant:
You, Momo
Janelle:
Thanks for having us. Maybe one day, it's a goal. Yes.
Momo:
Thank you guys. All right, that brings us to a new segment within this podcast that I'm excited about, and we're adding it to this episode, the Bio Monthly Challenge. There will be a challenge and there will be a reward. And so we are going to post this monthly challenge. So that's going to be for the month of March, and that is we are going to ask you to create or find a nutritious and delicious recipe that costs no more than $4, 4US dollars per meal. So keywords, nutritious and delicious. Those are the ones that we're going to be judging by. And you need to explain how this meal can be prepared for less than $4 per meal. And then you need to make it in your kitchen and take photos of the finished meal so that we can see what it looks like, and that's going to be a part of the judging criteria.
And then in the comments of this podcast, you would write the shortest version of the recipe that is sufficient for anyone to repeat and make that recipe. So it doesn't have to be one of those recipes where there's a long, long intro as to what this recipe is about and where it originates and so on. Write basically the shortest recipe and post a photo of that meal. And then Guru and I will review this challenge and decide who's the winner and go ahead and describe the reward.
Guru:
Yeah. We look forward to seeing a number of entries in the comments down below this episode. And when we see those different ideas, different pictures and the recipes and so forth, one of them is going to be a lucky winner. That winner is going to get a free Viome funbody intelligence test made to that. Yeah, this is like a $3.99 US dollar value, so this is not a small thing and you will get it at home. So you can test with Viome, you can get your molecular insights, you can get your food recommendations, you can get all the things, including that personalized recipe feature that I described earlier, all of those things will be in your hands. And the only way that you will qualify for this monthly challenge is to follow the instructions that Momo mentioned earlier, which is that you create a fine and nutritious and delicious recipe and should cost no more than four US dollars.
So you should show us what the cost is and you make it yourself in the kitchen, take a photo of the meal and put that photo in the comments, write a short version of the recipe. Believe me, this whole thing is going to be worth it for you because you're going to get this reward, which is going to be super fun. And then we can even explain your results to you maybe once you get your test and once you get your results and all of that stuff. First of all, I am excited about something we're doing this evening. It is a Bulgarian Oro Teka dance. So it's actually one of those circle dances, but kind of funky and complicated. So I really enjoy that, and I get a lot of aerobic exercise from it, and I cannot wait to go to that dance studio this evening. That's one cool thing that's going on in my life. The other thing—
Momo:
That sounds amazing, Guru. I mean, every time we mention the My own tests. It's just such an amazing feeling for me because we started developing those tests in 2010, so it's been 16 years. And even today, 16 years later, the vast majority of academic researchers do not have access to this technology. It's simply too expensive, too complicated, and just too complex, basically. And today, someone is going to ... Well, not today, but next month, someone is going to get a test kit that does this metatranscriptomic analysis of stool blood and saliva. So that's a very nice reward, Guru. That's amazing. So now let's go to the last section, which is what's in the next episode. We want to announce the next episode because it's a very exciting one to me especially. And so we have discussed a lot about the microbiome in this episode, and we will, of course, continue to discuss the microbiome, but there are still many people who don't know what exactly we mean when we say microbiome.
And so what is going on with microbiome? What is it? What are the tens of thousands of biochemical reactions that it performs? And the next episode, we're going to dive deep into all these questions in this fascinating world and show you a lot of data from the largest microbiome dataset we know. And that is our internal Viome dataset. And we actually just submitted a paper on that or one slice of our dataset. So that's very exciting. Guru?
Guru:
Yeah. And maybe you'll bring some props. We'll definitely get some data and charts and stuff like that like I normally do. And you know what, Momo, you are the leading expert in this area and I am going to be the student. Okay, my name is Guru, but I'm going to actually be the Shisha, which is the student, and you're going to be the guru next time, which is the teacher. And you will give us a glimpse into this world of microbiology that I know a lot of progress has been made over the last 10 to 20 years in the world as a whole, but I think no one has a bigger and more rich dataset than what Viome has today. So we are going to bring pieces of that data to show you what we can see in the microbiome. As many of you know, and I mentioned in the first episode, we have processed more than a million samples now from people from more than 100 countries.
So that's a lot of data, both the breadth and the depth of the data is unmatched. So we are going to bring those data views in different ways and show you what exactly is going on. And to me, it's actually mind-boggling how much stuff is going on there. And we will break it down for you and show you some pictures that you will be glad that you saw. Wow. Are you gonna be recording that? Are we gonna be able to show some clips of that?
Momo:
Amazing. Yeah. I mean, we're going to talk about different tests for microbiome that are available in the market and contrast that with Viome tests. We're going to talk about the taxonomy of microbes, which is the composition. We're going to talk about the biochemistry of the microbiome, which is their functions, relationship to humans and human health and so on. And so in conclusion, please don't forget the biomonthly challenge. Please participate in that and follow the challenge and put your comments down in this episode. We really look forward to seeing you back here. And please don't forget to subscribe because that's how you help us create more content, and that's how you help yourself by being notified when we publish new episodes.
Guru:
And if you have any comments or questions, please post them in the comment section below because we will be picking some of those questions and answering them in future episodes. So please- That's right. If you have thoughts, if you have questions, doubts, whatever about anything we are talking about, please post them and we are happy to respond. So mobile, I cannot wait for the next episode. Why not? I actually have some recordings, and maybe I'll bring one here. Sure, sure, no problem. I love all types of dancing and music, stuff like that. The other thing that I'm excited about is that I now have this bunch of AI agents that are doing some funky things for me in the background. This new generation of large language models combined with autonomous—
Momo:
I love it. Yes. Okay. I am Momo.
Guru:
I'm Guru. We're two PhDs on a pod.
Capabilities is just giving me so many ideas for what we can do. So I'm pretty excited about that. Maybe in a future episode, we can talk about that in more detail. And one more thing. I just started on a skin clinical study that one of my daughters is running. It's super exciting. It's a very nice serum that we're testing what the biological and the clinical impact is gonna be. You know, my wife and I are both doing that, and we'll see what happens.
Momo: I need that. You gotta send me the link. I need that. More than you.
Guru: I'll get you on. I'm not sure about more than me, but I'll get you the thing. And then finally, of course, I'm submitting the same paper that you mentioned earlier on, so I'm excited about that as well. So Momo, let's talk about why we're doing this podcast. So why don't you start?
Momo: Awesome. All right, yeah, this is really an important topic, and we've been talking about this for quite a long time, and we think the time is right now. Yeah, there are many reasons that we're going to talk, we started this podcast; this is our first episode, yay. And one of the reasons is that we want to explain preventive health to everyone. We want to really uncomplicate and simplify all of that conflicting and overwhelming amount of information.
More importantly, we're gonna make it fun. We're gonna make it really easy for everyone to learn and to understand because we're not going to just be pushing any one agenda. See, I think one of the main issues right now is that everyone is presenting sort of their angle, and they're very pushy and they're very assertive on that one angle. But if you have multiple people presenting their own angles in a very assertive way, people can get confused as to what is the real truth. So we don't have an angle, we don't have a bias, we're here to interpret the entire human knowledge and bring it to the masses and make it fun.
Guru: Sounds good. And you know, the idea of preventive health is so important because the current healthcare system is really not designed for preventive health. It's designed for sick care, right? So, you know, once you get sick, you go to the hospital, you go to your doctor, and they usually try to get you something to address your symptoms, you know, and yeah, and then you not only have a bad quality of life, you spend—
Momo: You'll manage your illness for the rest of your life.
Guru: Through your nose, and you're not actually helping yourself, you're not gonna have a very long health span. So preventive health is the opposite of that. You think about what you need to do today so you can avoid getting to that place. So I wanna talk about that to a large degree. The other major objective, Momo, is that we want to ground everything with data and with principles of good science, right? So one of the things we'll get to in a few minutes is that we have a ton of data that we can pull into various views that can answer many, many critical questions or claims that we are going to discuss on this podcast. It's not enough just to make a claim because you believe in something. You have to have the right experiments, you have to have the right data, you have to have the right evidence for it.
And in many cases, what people do is when they do have the right experiments and the science behind it, they kind of wrap it up with jargon and with complicated ideas and terminology, and so forth. So it doesn't hit everybody. It doesn't come across to everybody in an understandable way. So what we want to do is try to give examples. We want to try to show you simple ways of interpreting the data. We want to give more analogies. And very importantly, I think, we also want to perhaps look at multiple perspectives on the data, and sometimes there is going to be some conflict in the different perspectives, and we have to reconcile those conflicts.
And turns out when you have a standard study like is coffee good for you, some studies will come out and say coffee is good for you, some studies will come out and say coffee is bad for you, and they'll both have data. Turns out that many of these foods, like coffee, could be good for some people and maybe not good for other people. So it's not about what is good for a population or the average of a population. It's really about what is good for you as an individual. So what we want to bring it down to is not just look at the population data, but bring it down to the end of one, to the individual biology that will make a difference for you, and explain the principles behind why something complicated could actually be applied in a very rational way to an individual person, which, you know, start with yourself and then maybe the individuals in a family, right? So we can do all of those things.
Momo: Yeah, I think that's really the main takeaway and the highlight for people, for the audience, is to understand that diet and lifestyle need to be personalized, and diet especially. And we will present many, many examples, but I think I'll just go through a couple of those for now. For example, I think this alpha-gal allergy is now becoming a little more visible. There's this tick that bites people in the South.
And once that happens, some people become allergic to mammalian foods because of this molecule called alpha-gal. And they no longer can eat mammalian foods for the rest of their lives. Mammalian foods basically come from mammals, which are all red meats and all dairy. And so if there's some kind of a massive study that says cheese is great for humanity, if cheese makes you run to a hospital emergency room, cheese is not good for you. It doesn't matter that it's great for humanity overall, right?
And then the same thing, if you do a food sensitivity test and your immune system is reactive to some food and you remove that food and you feel better, it doesn't matter what studies show that that food has in terms of benefits or detriments to the general population, you're not gonna eat it anymore. And I am one of those people who has gone through this journey, having some sort of an autoimmune condition that was never diagnosed as a young man.
And then, through trial and error, I tried every single diet possible. And it turns out that I am also sensitive. My immune system is also sensitive to mammalian foods, but it's not the alpha-gal. It's not an allergy, it's a sensitivity to mammalian foods. And the point I want to make here is that I had to individualize my diet very, very clearly. Like if I eat any mammalian food, I'm sick for a month. And here's one of the highlights of this podcast. We are going to enable people to have fun with changing their dietary and lifestyle habits to become healthier, but having fun doing it.
Because I think that one of the really bothersome aspects of dieting and exercise is that people hate it. People don't want to go to the gym and work hard. People don't want to avoid foods or eat some foods that they don't like. That's just super restrictive, super hard, as if cooking isn't hard enough, right? So I was in the shoes where I basically had a very restrictive diet, and I didn't like cooking. And over a period of several years, I figured it out. And now I love cooking. I love inventing new foods. I have a highly, highly positive relationship with foods and cooking. And we will definitely be talking about that as a sort of a common thread. I'll be bringing recipes, and we'll have cooking shows and cooking challenges, and all that stuff, and really make our interactions with food fun. And the same thing with exercise and Zen.
Guru: Actually, for exercise, I want to tell you an example from my life, right? I used to try various things like going to the gym and trying out different types of exercises, both resistance training and some types of aerobic training as well, but nothing ever really stuck for very long. And then I became a runner, and I used to train very hard. And after a couple of years and a marathon and everything else, I ended up saying to myself, this is not fun because you spend hours and hours every week training. And yes, of course, I used to read audiobooks while running, which was part of the fun that I had. But over time, it became too long and too monotonous. So I decided to switch to table tennis. Actually, that's one of our common interests. Table tennis is so much fun. It's social. It is competitive if you want it to be. It is definitely–
Momo: It is weather-independent.
Guru: Rather exactly, so important in a place like New York, right? It's like, you know, it's snowing outside. I go inside my club, which is not too far from where I am right now, by the way, and I can play, and I always have people who are interested in playing, which is amazing. And then I mentioned the Bulgarian dance, right? I've taken up different types of dancing as another aerobic exercise. So, you know, you can make it fun. You can make it fun, and it becomes sustainable over the long—
Momo: Yep, that's the key. That's the key. If it's not fun, people are gonna stop doing it. So I guess as of right now, we're gonna kind of split it up, and I'll be showing people how to have fun with food and cooking, and you'll be showing people how to have fun with exercise. Maybe.
Guru: Well, yeah, and then we'll switch it around, you know, do whatever it takes. Yeah.
Momo: We'll switch it around, sure. Yeah. All right, so this brings us to the next topic, which is why we started Viome, because it's now our 10th year, and let's talk about the background of Viome. So I'll start with talking about the epidemic of chronic disease. So if you just think about, let's say the 1950s and 60s in developed countries, if you look at pictures of beaches or public events, you can see that there were very few obese people. And if you look at the statistics, there were very few people with diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis. Alzheimer's was essentially an unknown disease, inflammatory bowel disease. All these diseases were very rare. And today, those are so common that you're not surprised at all when someone tells you that they have a chronic disease. That's completely normal.
Same with allergies, you know, allergies used to be really rare, and today it's just expected that people will have allergies. And so we have this huge epidemic of chronic diseases, and there are, of course, an infinite number of speculations out there as to what is the root cause. And we could be spending the rest of our lifetime looking at those speculations and wondering what is the root cause, or we could actually solve the problem.
And so that's exactly what Viome is for. Our mission is to solve that problem of what is the root cause of chronic diseases and cancers, and how can we prevent it? And the reason that this is needed is because neither academia nor pharma, which are the two largest entities that are health focused, are actually solving the problem. Academics are super smart, super hardworking, but they're really focused on publishing papers. They're not focused on translating the knowledge that's relevant to human health into our hands. And pharma, as we discussed earlier, their business model is to manage diseases, not to prevent them. And understanding that is very important to say that, okay, we need another entity that's actually gonna focus on prevention. And that's exactly what Viome is about.
So when we were thinking about, you know, I started thinking about this platform back in about 2010, like in earnest, when I reset my scientific career, and I thought, okay, what kind of data do we need to generate on the human body in order to really understand all the different mechanisms of how it works, that we can then tune and prevent chronic disease and cancers? And when I looked at all the data streams that we could obtain from the human body, such as DNA sequencing, RNA sequencing, protein sequencing, and then metabolites, which are basically molecules, there were trade-offs with each one of those, but RNA came on top as the single best source of data that can digitize the human body, tell us exactly what's working well and what's not working well, and then identify ways to tune the human physiology. And so after about six years, that technology was developed at Los Alamos National Lab under my supervision and leadership. And then we patented all that, and now Viome continues the development of translating that data to humanity.
Guru: Amazing, Momo. This was the spark, or one of the sparks, that created the underlying foundation for Viome. That foundation needs more layers on top in order to translate that into usable clinical applications. In order to translate and transform that platform that you've built, which is the laboratory assay for RNA analysis and other kinds of analysis, too, into clinical applications, we have literally built a vertical platform. And that platform includes all of the algorithms that are required to understand the data that comes out of your lab.
Right? And it also has to do with all of the experimentation that's required, the discovery that's needed to understand the pathways underneath the known set of activities that happen within your body, right? The biology in your body. So we built all this data, and over the last almost 10 years now, it's a little bit, you know, when we started the product, I think in Miami it was April 2017 if I remember correctly. So I think it's going to be fully 10 years next year. So in that period of time, we have generated a tremendous amount of data, and I want to show you very quickly what that data looks like. Okay, so here is—
Momo: I think you need to find a better superlative than tremendous. I think it's more than tremendous.
Guru: Okay, all right, well, we'll keep looking for that. Extraordinary. How about that? This picture gives you a view.
So we have collected at this point in time an unprecedented amount of untargeted molecular data, and specifically, let's start from beginning here, right? We have people from more than 100 countries who've sent us more than, actually, well more than 1 million biological samples at this point in time. And when we say biological samples, we mean—
Guru: Stool samples, blood samples, saliva samples, mainly, but we also have other kinds of samples because we have clinical studies where we do samples that could be other tissue types in the body, liquid biopsies, and so on. But from that data, we have sequenced about a petabase, right? 10 to the 15 RNA nucleotides from that data. And now it's getting closer and closer to 10 to the 16.
And from that set of nucleotides and all of the metadata that we've collected, we have now also computed 10 to the 16, which is more than 10 peta data points. So it's all peta-scale data over here. We've computed that many data points. And this is the largest collection of metatranscriptomic data that we have ever come across currently on the planet.
If somebody is listening out there and if you know of other sources of metatranscriptomic data, please speak up, put a comment down below, and we'll take a look at it. But we think this is the largest dataset of metatranscriptomic data that's anywhere on the planet right now. And we have extracted from these nucleotide sequences more than 65 trillion molecular features, and when we say molecular features, we mean genes and organisms, meaning represented by genomes.
Equally importantly, we have collected a huge amount of phenotype metadata. And when we say phenotype metadata, we mean people telling us about their symptoms, their diseases, the medications they take, the lifestyles that they follow, the demographics that they're in, and so forth. And the combination of the molecular features that we get and the phenotype metadata that we get is tremendous because once you look at the two things together, you can start looking at disease, health, what the differences are, what are the pathways that are leading toward disease, the pathways leading toward health, and there's a huge amount of machine learning and AI that we've done to understand some of this data. I just show on this picture here about 30 different AI and machine learning models for pathways and biomarkers, but there's actually a lot more than that. And we'll go through many of those during these episodes.
But it's not just understanding what's going on in these samples. We've actually provided those insights back to the individuals who have sent us these samples. And we've given people more than 22 million such insights so far, and we've given them more than 140 million nutritional recommendations for how to optimize their molecular pathways. So we've given them foods that could be ideal for them. So we call them superfoods. We tell them which foods they should avoid so that they don't exacerbate some of their molecular pathways. We tell them what kinds of ingredients they should emphasize, potentially as supplements to enhance the nutritional quality. We've given them all kinds of data. So there is literally a treasure trove of data that we think we can ask so many questions of, and we can build so many different models and algorithms to understand better and use that to improve human health.
So along the same lines, whenever we talk about this type of data, we also look at what are the differences between different cohorts of people. And one of the very common questions that I get from people that I talk to about this dataset, which by the way also includes microbiome data and human data, so it's human gene expression, microbiome gene expression, and of course genomic activity, meaning all the species that are active in any one of these samples, so we count all of those things. So one of the common questions I get is, listen, yeah, you guys have learned a lot from all of this microbiome data, but if I'm from a completely different place, let's say I'm from somewhere in the middle of Africa, is my microbiome going to be very, very different? Right, so we have studied this question because we have data from many populations from around the world. So one particular study that we did was between populations in the US and populations in Japan. And we took, randomly, people in the US from that collection of people, which is tens of thousands of people—
And a lot of people again from Japan. And we asked the question, how similar are their microbiomes if they're from the same country versus when they're from different countries? So the really surprising result that came out, actually we kind of expected it, but it's surprising to a lot of people, is that when you look at the species of the microbiome that exists in a random person in the US and a random person in Japan, it could be only about 50% similar, meaning that they look very, very different. That's what has traditionally made people think that microbiomes are very different from different parts of the world.
But the species are not the real story. The real story is what are the biological functions that are going on in your gut as a result of the activity of these species, which is also known as the gene expression. So when you look at all these activities, meaning we call those functions, different functions for replication, for metabolism, for other immune functions, and so on and so forth, when you look at all of those functions, it turns out that a random person in the US and a random person in Japan are more than 80% similar. And it turns out that if you take two random people in the US, they're more than 80% similar as well. So it's very, very similar in terms of your microbiome functions, regardless of where you come from. You could be in the same country, you could be in different countries. As humans and as a planet which has evolved together, we have a set of functions that has allowed us to survive. We've evolved to optimize those functions, and we've evolved to thrive. So those functions are very similar across very large swaths of geography.
I've said a lot of things, and Momo has said a lot of things, and we want to have time to talk about all of these things in detail in this episode, but guess what? We're going to be talking about each one of these topics in multiple episodes that are going to come up, and I'm hoping that all of you will join us in future episodes when we dig deep, deep dive into many of these topics, not just by ourselves, but also with guests, some really great people who have studied these subjects, who have practiced these subjects, and who can give us a lot more knowledge about what it means and how to use it in real life and so forth. So, for example, we could pick a topic like the following: Why is your microbiome your best friend? And we could spend an entire episode telling you why.
In fact, those bugs are not your enemies; they are your friends. They are necessary for you to survive and thrive. So we need to understand how to take care of them, and we need to actually make them as good as we can possibly make them.
Momo: Yeah, I think that we're going to have multiple episodes. We need multiple episodes to just scratch the surface of why is microbiome our best friend? So we'll talk about that for sure. And now it's time to close for today. So let's talk about some takeaways and learnings from today. Guru, go ahead.
Guru: Yeah, so the first takeaway for me is that this podcast is about a vision to eradicate chronic disease and cancers from the planet, right? So very, very importantly, this is not magical thinking because we believe this, science and the technology needed to solve this problem exists today. And we think we can apply that, we can scale that, and we can make it work for the majority of humans.
Momo: Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. I just want to remind people that in the 13th century, Black Death caused a third of the world's population to die off. And at that time, life or death was literally a matter of luck. If you survived, you were lucky. And if you died, you were not lucky.
And that's because we had no tools and no science to actually understand the root cause of Black Death, which was the Yersinia pestis microorganism. Today, we understand that, and therefore, there's no fear of the Black Death of any kind. And unfortunately, when it comes to chronic diseases and cancers, we're literally in the 13th century because we currently do not know what causes any of the chronic diseases or cancers. And we cannot tell anyone what to do intentionally at a personalized level in order to prevent them. And so that's really what our mission is, is to answer those questions. What is the root cause of Alzheimer's? What is the root cause of Parkinson's, type 2 diabetes, every cancer, and so on? And then in a very deterministic, very intentional way, teach people how to prevent those diseases. That's our mission. We can't do that today, but we will do it one day.
And I'd like to say that one of the takeaways that people should have from this podcast, that it's going to be a common thread throughout, is that we want to make a very positive relationship with health and nutritional, and lifestyle choices and practices that support good health. There is no need to have a negative relationship and sort of dread, I have to cook something, or I have to eat something. We're gonna make it positive.
Guru: Yeah, we have a lot of exciting topics, Momo. And I cannot wait for the next episode. I think the number of ideas that are cooking right now are just amazing. And I think all of our audience members should find something very interesting in most of our episodes. So I would encourage all of you to hit the subscribe button now. So just go down there, hit the subscribe button, and we hope to see you here in the next episode.
Momo: Yeah, hit that subscribe button, and here's a little teaser. So in the next episode, we will be answering the following question. Is there a super-tasty dessert that is easy to make? I'm talking about two minutes, and that is also very healthy, at least for most people. We'll talk about personalization, of course. Yes, the answer is yes. And we will show you one. So very exciting. So that's it for today's episode. I'm Momo.
Guru: I'm Guru, and we are two PhDs on a pod.
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