A Suspicious Gut Microbiome: 19 Conditions Linked to Dysbiosis

Your gut can either be a fountain of youth...or the biggest drag on your health. When the ecosystem of 40 trillion microorganisms living in your gut are thrown into chaos, they can wreak havoc on your health. Microbial imbalance or dysbiosis is linked to all sorts of conditions. We aren’t the first to see that the gut is the epicenter of overall health – Hippocrates the ‘Father of Medicine’ famously stated over 2,000 years ago that, “All disease begins in the gut.” This statement is proving to be more true than anyone fully realized.

Jul 09, 2018

Can’t Lose Weight? 3 Ways Your Gut Bacteria Could Be to Blame

A diverse community of organisms means you have all sorts of bacteria that help with certain roles. The work is divided and you know how that saying goes: many hands make light work. So when you have a diverse group of just the right microbes – your energy production is up, your metabolism is running like a dream, and you feel fantastic. Scientists have found that certain gut microbes help shape your body and keep obesity at bay. A recent study on “intestinal microbiota alterations” in obese individuals suggests “it may be possible to intervene in obesity by targeting the gut microbiota.”1 One day we might even be able to lose weight by simply adding certain bacteria to the gut microbiome.

Jul 22, 2018

Let's Get Dirty! Why Being Too Clean Isn't Always Better

As a parent, you want your child to be happy and healthy. You go to great lengths making sure they have a safe environment, attend the right school, and have the best opportunities available to them. You try to feed your child right and make sure they get enough exercise. But there’s another factor equally as important as good diet and exercise, if not more important. We want to know, are you making sure your child is getting enough bacteria?

Aug 09, 2018

Improve Insulin Sensitivity With This Single Step

The struggle to lose weight and ward off disease has a lot to do with your insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity can be defined as as, “how responsive your cells are to insulin". Improving it can help you reduce insulin resistance and the risk of many diseases, including diabetes. Improving insulin sensitivity is a goal to put at the top of your health goals. Why? It’s well documented that controlling your blood sugar levels is crucial to your overall health.

Aug 15, 2018

Are Antimicrobial Cleaning Products Making Children Fat? New Study Says Yes

Everyday household cleaners may be contributing to obesity in children by altering their gut microbiome, a new study says.

Oct 03, 2018

19 Science-Backed Ways to Improve Your Gut Health

You’ve probably noticed the monsoon of gut health advice flooding the internet. This surge was triggered by the discovery of the gut microbiota – or the 40 trillion microorganisms living in your gut. Researchers continue to uncover how this ecosystem plays a role in nearly every biological function in the body, which makes anyone concerned with their health ask the obvious question: How do you improve gut health naturally?

Oct 04, 2018

Pucker Up: Each Kiss Swaps 80 Million Microbes

When you lean in for a passionate kiss with your partner, you’re not just getting a surge of the love hormone oxytocin, you’re also exchanging about 80 million microbes. We’re not talking any ole kiss here – we mean at least a 10 second French kiss.

Feb 12, 2019

The Microbiome and Weight Gain: Everything We Know So Far

In our grandparents’ times, obesity was a rare occurrence. This has changed over the past four decades. According to the World Health Organization, obesity has almost tripled since 1975. Today, more than one-third of the world’s population is either overweight or obese. While this was more prevalent in first-world countries, it is now common in most parts of the world. Currently, obesity and being overweight kills more people than undernourishment.

Mar 04, 2019

How to stick to a diet according to Science

When beginning a new diet, what you are essentially dealing with is a change in habit. And as the 19th century, Scottish writer Samuel Smiles mentions. “ To uproot an old habit is sometimes a more painful thing and vastly more difficult than to wrench out a tooth.”

Mar 14, 2019

No Guts, No Glory – 9 Ways The Gut Microbiome Impacts Athletic Performance

What if one day athletes could inoculate themselves with microscopic organisms that made them run faster, jump higher, and recover like wolverine? Sounds like a Marvel movie doesn't it? But what if we were to tell you that every athlete is already covered in microbes living in and on them that can give them an edge over their competition?

Jul 05, 2018

A Suspicious Gut Microbiome: 19 Conditions Linked to Dysbiosis

Your gut can either be a fountain of youth...or the biggest drag on your health. When the ecosystem of 40 trillion microorganisms living in your gut are thrown into chaos, they can wreak havoc on your health. Microbial imbalance or dysbiosis is linked to all sorts of conditions. We aren’t the first to see that the gut is the epicenter of overall health – Hippocrates the ‘Father of Medicine’ famously stated over 2,000 years ago that, “All disease begins in the gut.” This statement is proving to be more true than anyone fully realized.

Jul 09, 2018

Can’t Lose Weight? 3 Ways Your Gut Bacteria Could Be to Blame

A diverse community of organisms means you have all sorts of bacteria that help with certain roles. The work is divided and you know how that saying goes: many hands make light work. So when you have a diverse group of just the right microbes – your energy production is up, your metabolism is running like a dream, and you feel fantastic. Scientists have found that certain gut microbes help shape your body and keep obesity at bay. A recent study on “intestinal microbiota alterations” in obese individuals suggests “it may be possible to intervene in obesity by targeting the gut microbiota.”1 One day we might even be able to lose weight by simply adding certain bacteria to the gut microbiome.

Jul 22, 2018

How The Microbiome Affects Athletic Performance

Every human has trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi living inside and on them in multiple microbial ecosystems known as microbiomes. When it comes to athletes specifically, their gut bacteria plays an even more significant role in how well they perform and how quickly they recover. Gut microbes are responsible for the way in which our bodies break down carbohydrates, fiber, protein, and for regulating the body’s energy. These microbes influence the body’s inflammatory response, stress resilience, neurological function, and even impacting mental strength—all of which are important to athletic performance.

May 05, 2019

Is The Gut Microbiome The Key To Curing Chronic Diseases?

Our gut microbiome is our most important human organ. This complex ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and bacteriophages has been called the conductor of the immune–neuroendocrine system, home of the immune system, and even the second brain. In fact, the gut microbiome’s role in human biology is so widespread that scientists from nearly every specialty are checking for potential solutions within the gut. With chronic diseases on the rise across the world, the gut microbiome is now front and center in this epidemic.

May 20, 2019

Let's Get Dirty! Why Being Too Clean Isn't Always Better

As a parent, you want your child to be happy and healthy. You go to great lengths making sure they have a safe environment, attend the right school, and have the best opportunities available to them. You try to feed your child right and make sure they get enough exercise. But there’s another factor equally as important as good diet and exercise, if not more important. We want to know, are you making sure your child is getting enough bacteria?

Aug 09, 2018

Your Microbiome Can Impact Your Glycemic Response

In Viome’s latest breakthrough clinical research study, we found that the glycemic response to foods varies greatly based on each person’s unique gut microbiome. In this scientific paper published by our researchers, we describe the clinical study in which we compare how different foods affect blood glucose on an individual level.

Jul 01, 2019

The Microbiome Obesity Connection

Over the last few decades, researchers have been on a quest to find the root causes of obesity. With research on the gut microbiome rolling in on a regular basis, scientists have recently uncovered evidence that your gut microbes may also be partly to blame.

Jul 12, 2019

Improve Insulin Sensitivity With This Single Step

The struggle to lose weight and ward off disease has a lot to do with your insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity can be defined as as, “how responsive your cells are to insulin". Improving it can help you reduce insulin resistance and the risk of many diseases, including diabetes. Improving insulin sensitivity is a goal to put at the top of your health goals. Why? It’s well documented that controlling your blood sugar levels is crucial to your overall health.

Aug 15, 2018

Let’s Talk About Depression

It’s estimated that almost 20 million adults in the United States have experienced depression at some point in their life. Although feeling sadness and grief are normal human emotions, experiencing depression can be a life-threatening disorder - including putting your own life at risk. It can feel like living in a tower of solitude, isolated by an overwhelming ocean in a storm with no end in sight. For families, having a loved one suffering from this disease can feel like drowning, without hope in sight for what seems like an impenetrable condition. The economic burden associated with depression each year costs America over 210 billion dollars. That includes lost income at work, to the cost of medication, down to the costs associated with hospital visits. Ultimately, the greatest cost of mental health disorders are the number of lives that are taken each year, too soon.

Aug 19, 2019

Is Gut Imbalance to Blame for Your Hormonal Changes?

Not surprisingly, the man who wrote “women age like fine wine,” forgot to mention the unpleasant changes many women experience as they age. Whereas, we like to believe women enter their more mature years as graceful and radiant creatures, the truth is many women are more likely to be experiencing waves of hot flashes that seem to frequent as quickly as they appear. Although there are many things to appreciate in life as we age - like wisdom and our growing families - mood swings and other biological changes don’t quite make the list.

Sep 13, 2019

Understanding Your Viome Scores

Going through your app or website screens you might find yourself wondering – How did we get all those scores and why do they matter? Many keywords are defined in the app, and the results offer a brief explanation each, but here we are going to talk about how these different pieces are tied together. We are excited to share with you the scientific vision behind your Viome scores.

Jul 23, 2019

10 Things Viome's Gut Test Can Reveal About Your Gut Microbiome

There’s a lot of tests out there that offer personalized diet recommendations. Viome’s food recommendations are supported by an in-depth analysis of your living microorganisms and their behavior on a molecular level. Think of it as the Instagram to your inner world—a snapshot of what’s happening inside your body, and each day we're getting a bigger picture. Curious to know some things this gut test can reveal about you? You may be more than a little surprised by what you find.

Sep 14, 2019

Is It Time to Table the Salt? How Salt May Be Affecting Your Microbiome

When you consume foods high in salt, the food passes through your digestive system and into your intestines, where most of your nutrients are absorbed and released into your blood. Excessive levels of sodium in your bloodstream can have very harmful health effects. It can cause many serious conditions like hypertension, or high blood pressure. Hypertension is known as a silent killer because most people can live for years without experiencing any symptoms. However, if left untreated, hypertension can increase your risk of cardiovascular events like heart attack or stroke. More recently, salt intake has been linked to inflammatory conditions like Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and autoimmune disorders, and now the list even extends to our gut health.

Sep 15, 2019

The Neurodegenerative Disease: Alzheimer’s and the Gut Microbiome

The heartbreak of having a loved one struggle with Alzheimer’s disease comes not only from losing them after a difficult battle, but from watching with devastation as they slowly lose themselves. Alzheimer’s continues to be one of the most under-diagnosed and under-treated diseases in America, costing over 170 billion dollars per year in healthcare costs1.

Sep 01, 2019

Race to 2 Million: Join Us In the Battle Against Chronic Diseases

Viome’s mission has always been to make chronic illness optional – a goal we firmly believe is not only achievable, but within grasp when enough people care to solve the problem. Artificial intelligence requires a massive amount of data in order to identify patterns, especially when you factor in the many different activities that may cause the same disease in different individuals. We’re racing to 2 million gut microbiomes in an effort to unmask the mystery that clouds many chronic diseases including how individualized the activity of one’s gut microbiome truly is. Each month of our Race to 2 Million campaign we focus on a chronic disease and what we’re learning about it in relation to the gut microbiome. For the month of August, we’re zeroing in on depression.

Aug 12, 2019

The “Superfood” Conundrum: How Someone’s Superfood May Not Be So Super for You

If you follow health trends, you might notice the word “superfood” gets tossed around quite a bit. It seems like every month a new food is deemed super – like quinoa, broccoli, spinach, and blueberries. It’s not hard to see why: these foods are rich in antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals - and often times powerful natural anti-inflammatories. But one of the most common mistakes we make is assuming one superfood is a super food for all and frankly, our gut microbiome has its own opinion on that.

Sep 23, 2019

How Viome is Redefining the One-Size-Fits-All Health Industry

Like all revolutions, it started small: research began uncovering how individuals following a “healthy” diet experienced a wide variety of results. As time went on, it expanded as other studies unmasked nutritional status or dietary connections to a variety of diseases. Then came the discovery of the gut microbiome and the essential roles of microbes in digestion. This breakthrough shed light on why many diet trends missed the target for countless seeking weight-loss solutions.

Oct 11, 2019

Gut Health and Cancer

Incidences of cancer in America are on the rise, with your probability of being diagnosed in your lifetime greater than 1 in 3 - a statistic supported by the nearly 5,000 people who are diagnosed with some form of cancer each day. Although the number of cancer deaths has slowly been declining over the last 30 years (thanks to advancements in treatment) cancer mortality is still at nearly 40%, a number that is all too high.

Oct 01, 2019

Recent Links Between The Gut Microbiome and Cancer

Cancer research has come a long way in the last few decades. Although progress is often slow, taxing, and difficult to generate clinical relevance, the studies you read about today may very well be the tipping point for future therapies. Similarly, some studies have shown the gut microbiome may play a pivotal role in how cancerous conditions occur, creating a field of research that has left many scientists excited to explore.

Oct 13, 2019

Meet Your Second Brain: The Gut Microbiome and Your Digestion

If you’re an avid reader of the Viome blog, you might have read some interesting news about the gut-brain axis and mental health and behavior, but you might not realize how connected it is to normal digestion, too. The gut-brain axis is “bidirectional” which means messages and signals are sent both from the gut to the brain via the vagus nerve, and from the brain to the gut. That means, your gut microbes might be telling your brain what to eat, but your brain is also telling your gut when to start digesting and how quickly it occurs. The messages being sent to your GI tract are just as important as the ones being sent from it – but these interactions may affect you in several different ways.

Oct 10, 2019