Translating Microbiome Science to Precision Nutrition

Guru, Momo, along with Viome Precision Nutrition Scientists Janelle and Grant, explore the fascinating world of personalized nutrition, microbiome science, and how Viome's innovative testing and AI-driven recommendations can transform health and wellness. Discover how complex molecular data translates into practical dietary advice tailored to your unique biology.

Transcript:

Guru:
Hey, Momo.

Momo:
Hey, Guru.

Guru:
Listen, there is this famous phrase in biology which is lost in translation. So the academic community, by the way, since we are two PhDs, I think we kind of grew up in the academic community. So we can poke fun at ourselves a little bit. The academic community is incredible at doing academic research and generating some data and then putting it on the shelf and not doing anything about it, meaning that it just sits there, never gets translated. So this whole microbiome science field basically speaks Latin, but we really need it to speak dinner or lunch in our general daily life. So how did we get here, man?

Momo:
Nice pick for the language. I know, I know. I mean, my personal journey has transitioned from academia to a private company like Viome because of this sort of understanding that academia are neither equipped nor incentivized to translate that knowledge into people's hands. And so while academics are super smart, super hardworking, they simply don't have the tools and don't have the incentivization model to translate that knowledge. And it can be frustrating to a common person who is reading some papers saying, "Wow, this is a breakthrough paper where they discovered certain microbial species that are associated with a disease like multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or pick any disease or cancer."
And they're like, "Well, but I don't know what am I going to do with that information? It's kind of interesting, but I can't do anything about it. I cannot literally do anything." So that's a huge gap I think in the overall state of affairs in the scientific field. And so this is where companies like Viome come in and we take those academic discoveries. That's exactly what happened with my teams. My teams discovered all these technologies at Los Alamos National Lab and now we license those. And now at Viome, we are 100% focused on translating those and actually telling people based on that information exactly what to do. In fact, our customers don't really have to look at any of their results. They never have to. They just need to look at the recommendations and just follow those recommendations. Now, if they want to geek out, they can look at why those recommendations are made and then they could go back to the results and we explain why that is, but we really are focused on translating that knowledge.
So that's super important. And we are going to spend today's episode explaining to people how do we translate these very complex molecular data into what you're going to make for dinner and breakfast and so on. So I'm really excited about it. I'm Momo, a biochemist.
And I'm Guru, an AI expert.

Guru:
We're two PhDs on a FOD.

Momo:
All right. So let's start the episode. Guru, what's on your radar?

Guru:
All right, man. I got to tell you, I am in a super excited state right now because as you know- As everybody knows. ... yesterday. Woo-hoo. My God, I got to tell you, this city, New York City literally erupted. When that happened last night. I can't imagine. Nobody went home. People were partying on the streets until or six o'clock in the morning. I see all my team members coming in and everyone's sleepy. I got myself a double espresso this morning just to wake up and everything. And my team members put up this little K with go knicks from our office window, which you can see Broadway from our office view.
Momo:
Sweet view.

Guru:
It's a neat view. And we have a plaza in front of us so we can actually spend some time getting good lunch and everything else. But ma, the Knicks have basically lit a fire under the city. The whole city is so happy. So that's on my radar. The other thing that's on my radar, speaking of the city, is a beautiful event that I went to last weekend called the Tribeca Film Festival.

Momo:
The famous one.

Guru:
It's a pretty famous film festival, as you know. A lot of great movies, but there was one movie in particular memo that comes from your part of the world, which is the Balkans. Turns out it also is my wife's part of the world. She's from Macedonia. So there's this Macedonian director who you see on the left-hand side. There's a director, there's the main actor of the movie and there was a whole discussion and there was this movie called Why Girls Don't Skate or something like that or Shouldn't Skate or something. It's basically about the life of a gypsy girl who breaks the taboos and gets out of the usual box that they are put into and all of that. Great movie. And it won a lot of awards and everything. And after the movie, we hung out with the director, the main actress in the movie and some of my friends, actually one of my friends is from Montenegro.
So I was telling her about you and that I have a really good friend from Montenegro. And so that was my social life in the last few days. And one other topic I want to put on the radar is a scientific result. So we put out a new preprint on a super important topic, which is about how we can translate the pathway activities that we discover and detect within our datasets into very specific and modifiable disease risks. The disease risks part of it is the connection between the activity of the specific pathways and one of these 15 diseases that you see on this slide. You see all the way from Sjogren's syndrome all the way to IBS depression, which is the gut-brain axis, ADHD, et cetera, all the way down to chronic fatigue syndrome, hypertension and so on. And it shows that on the X-axis, it shows the risk ratio, which is quite high.
More than 50% increased risk for people who have these pathways that are out of whack. And the modifiable part of it is that this is all coming from your RNA gene expression. That's the activity of the scores. So if you can modify your lifestyle, meaning nutrition, supplements, other things like sleep, stress, all of those things, activity, exercise, all of those things, you can actually change your risk factors and therefore you can literally improve your chronic disease profile and live a long healthy life. Please go check out the paper. We're going to put a link in our show notes and everything. And you're an author, a co-author on this paper as well. So both you and I are super happy to have this paper out there for the whole community to read and specifically doctors to read.

Guru:
It's on your radar.

Momo:
Yeah. I mean, I want to just comment this is really a seminal paper in the field in that in clinical practice there are all these tests that you can do that are either presenting you with a risk like APOE4 is a genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease, but then what are you going to do about it? It's a DNA-based test that's integrated into all your cells. There's not much you can do about it. You can apply some generic advice, but you cannot really precisely figure out how to help yourself. And then there are all these other tests such as like LDL and insulin resistance that tell you, "Hey, you're on your way to developing a disease or you already have a disease, but what do you do about it? " Well, healthcare professionals are most likely going to prescribe you drugs for most diseases, although for, as we know for some of them, there aren't even any drugs, but this is a quantum leap in that every single disease risk is tied to specific molecular scores that we quantify with our clinically validated test and those scores can be modified using micronutrients in foods and supplements.
So there's a direct connection there between disease risk and what you eat and in some cases exercise because mitochondrial health is also tied to, for example, resistance training and cardiovascular cardio training. So yeah, super excited about this. This is our, I think, gateway to making the mission accomplished for integrating nutrition, data-driven, personalized nutrition into the healthcare system. So
Very
Excited about that. All right, let's talk about what's on my radar. So yeah, I just got back from Madagascar. My wife and I went there to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary and this has been on my radar like top 10 list for many, many, many years, but it's so far away and it's kind of a complicated situation because they don't really speak English there. It's very rural and so on. So we hired a very capable guide and he took us all around and we experienced traditional completely non-touristy lifestyle and it was great, one of the best travel experiences. So love that. And most people don't know that, but the vast majority of plant and animal species in Madagascar are endemic to Madagascar. They're only found on Madagascar. So as you're walking through the national parks and you're seeing animals and plants, it's very likely those don't exist anywhere else in the world.
So that's pretty cool. That

Guru:
Is very cool.

Momo:
And then I also am super excited about this because I just presented this next slide at two recent conferences, one in China and one in New Mexico where we really now have the data to demonstrate the power of personalized nutrition. Because what I would like people to understand is that when a clinical trial is reported in the literature and it says that a drug or a treatment works, what that means is that it worked for the average participant in that trial. And so what you can see on the left side here is that in this particular case, cocoa did reduce blood pressure in the study population on average. The key is here on average, but what you can see here is that individualized responses can vary from some people benefited greatly from cocoa, meaning their blood pressure got reduced a lot, but unfortunately some people's blood pressure actually went up.
And if you hear that cocoa reduces blood pressure, you might go eat a bunch of cocoa, but in fact it may have the opposite effect on you. You don't know that from the trial results. And this is not an exception. In fact, I am not aware of any trial with a generic advice that does not perform this way, where some people actually get worse during the trial. But if you look on the right side, these are fresh off the press our clinical trial results from our randomized placebo controlled trial for constipation. And this is a Bayesian representation of the data where we show that basically 100% of participants that were given the treatment improved over the placebo. And that's really the power of nutrition and Viome's data driven personalized nutrition that you can actually have an impact on 100% of the population, which is unprecedented.
So hyper excited about that.

Guru:
That is cool. And obviously we're going to write this up and publish it shortly and-

Momo:
In progress at the moment, yes.

Guru:
And when it's published, we will describe it in great detail and provide all the information that's necessary for somebody to go understand this. And speaking of personalized nutrition, Momo, in this episode, which we are going to focus entirely on the precision personalized nutrition, we're going to invite two really good colleagues who will describe this whole process of how the molecular insights we get from the Viome test can be translated into very practical advice, which is the food recommendations that you should pay attention to in your individual case and then converting that into recipes that will work for you really well and then converting that into meal plans. And then if you want, shopping those things all from the same app. And there's going to be a demo of all of that stuff later on, but for now, let's invite our guests on the show and describe the personalization and the precision nutritions that we generate.

Momo:
Let's go.

Guru:
All right. We have two special guests on our show today. We have Janelle and Grant. I think you met them in one of the earlier episodes. They are leading our clinical nutrition team. Welcome, Janelle. Welcome, Grant.

Grant:
Thanks, Guru. Thanks, Momo. Happy to be here.

Janelle:
Yes, thanks for having us again.

Guru:
Awesome. Awesome. So I would like to start this conversation by showing where we are in the series of episodes that we have created for our audience here. So you might remember that we started off by showing this journey of the user and the sample. So the user at the top sends their biological samples over to the Viome lab, the CLIA lab. The CLIA lab does a whole bunch of sample preparation and then sequencing and MoMO discuss the wet lab in one of the earlier episodes and we had a special guest, Lon, who discussed the dry lab, which is what happens after the data comes out of the sequencer. And the bioinformatics makes sense out of all of those reads and converts that into genes and genomes that are detected in your biological samples, which then goes into the Viome scoring engine, which is down here at the bottom.
And we had another episode earlier where we had two special guests, Eric Patridge and Matt Mulusky, who described to us how they make sense of the biological functions in the form of pathways where they look at the interactions of various enzymatic transcripts, RNA transcripts, as well as transporters and so on to detect the functional impact of all of the detected reads and all of the laboratory and bioinformatic work that we had done previously. So what comes out of the Viome scoring engine is a set of pathway scores that you can see in your at. We gave you examples of the sulfide score, the methane score, the ammonia score, all of them related to gas production, which is more of a functional score. And today we are going to focus on the Viome recommendation engine and potentially as it applies the Viome precision manufacturing process, where granted Janelle are going to talk about how they utilize all the functional insights that comes out of the Viome scores and converts that into highly actionable recommendations for food and supplements for our audience, meaning all the customers who have used the Viome test, all of the patients who've gotten the ordered tests from their doctors and so on and so forth.
So with that story, I also want to give a little bit of an overview that I'm sure Janelle and Grant are going to refer back to. When we talk about the Viome recommendation engine, it is a very sophisticated system that uses a variety of different algorithmic AI techniques to understand the ingredients or the substrates that come from foods on the left-hand side. We have a big database of hundreds of foods where we have already broken down the ingredients that are relevant and the macro and micronutrients that are relevant from each one of the foods, which then goes through a glycemic response prediction model. And you may remember that we had another episode with Dr. Eric Patridge and Dr. Damon Tanton, an endocrinologist and a diabetes expert where we talked about the study through which we can now predict your individual glycemic response for each one of the foods based on what is going on in your biology, your gut microbiome and the rest of your body, and the specific ingredients or the nutrients that come from individual foods.
And based on that, we are able to predict your glycemic response at almost 0.8 accuracy and we are able to classify every food into either enjoy foods or minimize foods. And remember again, that for some people in this example, I'm showing a banana that's spiking high, but for this other person it's low. And for the second person, bread happens to spike, whereas the first person bread is low. So it's very, very individual. It's super important to remember that. And so for you, a specific food may be an enjoy food. And for me, it could be a minimized food. And we talked about that whole population level statistics about how foods like bananas and oats can be more or less fifty fifty. So in order for you to know whether you are on the good side on the bad side, you really need to do a test in order to figure that out and then you can either enjoy it or minimize it depending on your individual biology.
Now once we have this classification of enjoy or minimize, we then get into analyzing the individual pathways that comes from the Viome scoring engine we discussed in the last episode and then we apply those insights to each one of the foods. So for example, in this case, I'm showing spinach, which for me could be an enjoy food based on the glycemic response prediction, but now we apply the microbiome pathway analysis, which looks at multiple pathways, like the butyrate pathway, the oxalate pathway, the sulfide pathway, and so on. So let's say in my case, oxidate elimination pathway is not so good, that means oxidate elimination pathways activity is low compared to the general population. Then we might actually demote spinach from the earlier enjoy food assessment all the way down to an avoid food because oxalates are going to accumulate in my gut because my gut is not able to eliminate oxalates very well.
Or if my oxalates are actually doing a great job, they're very active, they're able to eliminate very well, then we can promote the food from enjoy to a superfood, which is what I show here on the right-hand side. And of course the collection of the superfoods, enjoy foods, minimize foods and avoid foods is essentially your personalized precision food recommendations that you can see in your app. And in fact, I'm going to show some examples of my own personal food recommendations. In fact, I'm going to show a demo of that and then how you can turn that into recipes and then how you can turn that into meat plans that's coming up later in the episode. Just one last point I want to mention is that there's also a survey, an onboarding survey, which is used when necessary while doing all of these recommendations, which will make your recommendations even more relevant and personalized to you.
And safe.

Grant:
And safe.

Guru:
And safe. Thank you, Grant. Thank you, Grant. That safety part is super important because if you have particular food allergies and food sensitivities, we will capture that through the onboarding survey and we will make sure that the interactions to your medicines and the food allergies and sensitivities are taken into account in our recommendation. So that's the process of the Viome recommendation engine that I talked about. So that's the background. So Mobo, over to you to talk about some of the details of our Recommendation engine.

Momo:
Let's now dive deeper with Janelle and Grant. So yeah, let's talk about the specific VRE logic. So this is the Viome recommendation engine. It's a bunch of logical circuits that are converting and translating the microbiome and the human blood data directly into what you're going to do in the kitchen when you're preparing your food and what supplements you're going to be taking. So Janelle and Grant, let's talk about the most common topic I think for our customers, which is GI distress. Tell us about that.

Janelle:
Yeah, sure. And maybe I'll jump in here real quick too and say I love that overview of everything you guys have covered so far and I always think data, we love data here at Viome of course, but data is just data for you as an individual, right? You need that actionable par. And so this is really what we're talking about today is how do you take all of that data and put it into action so that you can actually see results. You can start feeling better and you can do that with your foods, which is awesome. So this is what I love to do is be able to say, "Hey, let's make this real for someone and let's really see a change for them." Okay. GI distress, I would say it's probably one of our most common reasons people start investigating Viome. They've got some gas and bloating, constipation, diarrhea, whatever it might be and they want to say, "Hey, what's going on with my gut?" And we can look at what's going on within the microbes and see if there's some interactions there with their foods that might be contributing to some of those issues for them.
One of them is methane gas. So we can look at the activity of the microbes and if they're producing methane gas, we know that there's microbes within the gut that produce that and be able to say, "Hey, what compounds within foods contributes to that? What's fueling that pathway and can we pull back on some of those things?" For someone that's seeing a lot of that, maybe in their results, we're going to say, "Hey, let's pull back on some of the carnitine." And it might surprise people that, "Hey, a lot of meats, animal products are actually contributing to my gas and bloating." Because I think a lot of times we only think about fiber contributing to it. Yeah, beans, all of those types of things, but people might be surprised at, actually, it's my high protein diet that's causing that. So we can differentiate or, hey, are we seeing more sulfide gas within the gut, which is going to cause its own different types of problems?

Grant:
Yeah. And it's really important because we don't talk about it a lot. No one wants to talk about their gut or their gas, their bloating, any changes to their bowel habits. It's a little taboo.

Guru:
We talked about grant in the last episode, that was the focus. It was all about gas- I know we

Grant:
Do, but we're not normal- It's

Momo:
Not a dinner conversation with friends.

Grant:
Yeah. No, my kids call me the poop doctor. We talk about it all the time, but socially at large, you keep it hush, hush. But this is a real impact on the quality of life. If you have GI symptoms and you're trying to go on a date or present to a board during a meeting, what have you, that can really affect your performance and your cognitive function. The list goes on and on, but- Confidence. ... a huge impact on quality of life. And it gets to the point though where you, okay, we know foods that can cause discomfort. We mentioned the beans, so we all know it's the magical fruit, but when it gets to the point where it's a guessing game and you don't know how your body's going to react. And you also get this anxiety that starts, anytime I'm going to have this meal, I don't know what's going to happen.
That's where the testing and the molecular science can really help disentangle those things and identify the foods that you're not even thinking about. Janelle just mentioned meats. Who knew meats were going to be contributing to gas and constipation even? So I just want to highlight that point because it is such a tremendous factor when it comes to our day-to-day livelihood and we got to stop guessing. We got to stop guessing and trial and error. And in the medical field, we know this is a real issue with people coming with IBS. They get delayed care and it truly is trial and error. Let's throw some things at you, see if it works. Nope. Oh, okay. Stick to the wall. Let's throw some things, some other things against the wall. So really, I think that's the beauty of this system, to quit the guesswork, get in, get some quantitative, actionable data that we can personalize your diet and so you see those improvements.

Momo:
Amazing. Amazing. Okay. So we spoke about gases and constipation and diarrhea. So there are molecular scores that we can quantify that will tell us exactly what are the root causes of those symptoms in certain people and then adjust their diet in a very personalized way to either remove specific micronutrients or to maximize specific micronutrients. So speaking of which, let's talk about the next thing, which is fiber. Janelle mentioned that most people would think that if they have gas and bloating, oh, they need to either reduce or stop eating fiber. Is that true, Janelle?

Janelle:
Well, we don't want to stop eating fiber. Our microbes need it. It's important for our digestive health, but the type of fiber might matter for you depending on what's going on in your microbiome. And so when I mentioned before like that methane gas example, we're going to have fibers that are like FOS and inulin, thinking things like artichokes and leaks, those types of foods that are rich in them can actually contribute to that type of gas production. Whereas for other people, they're going to handle those much better. If you have more sulfide gas within the gut, those foods can actually be helpful to help reduce that activity within the gut. So we want to be able to tailor the type of fiber you're eating to shunt it to the correct pathways where it's going to be helpful for you rather than harmful.

Guru:
Janelle, I think- Let me ask a question, Janelle, a very practical question. Okay. So for a normal person who's just going about their shopping and their cooking and everything, are there any easy ways for them to identify types of fibers that they can sort of keep in their minds on a daily basis before understanding what are the scientific differences between the types of fibers and so forth?

Janelle:
Oh, good question. It's a little bit tough to just identify a vegetable of like, "Hey, has it got a lot of inulin in it or not? " And unfortunately that's not always an easy thing, but luckily you've got your Biomap, you can ask your little AI bot in there and that's really good at being like, "Hey, I'm at the grocery store and I'm looking at these artichokes. I'm looking at this broccoli. Where does it fall within my group?" Or even if maybe it's another food and you're like, "Does this have inulin in it? I know I need to cut back on some mini." So there's tools out there that are going to help you with that. We can do broad categories like soluble versus insoluble fibers, your whole grains and your legumes as compared to vegetables and fruits and things like that. But I would say use your app as much as possible because that's going to be a really good tool

Guru:
When you're trying to navigate that fiber. Is get your VioMap and make it work for you rather than you remembering everything. Exactly.

Janelle:
Yeah.

Grant:
I love Dr. Lustig's if you guys have ever read Metabolical and I'm just going to pitch that book, I think everyone should read it, but I love to break down. Yeah. Just one thing for the average Joe to be thinking about one, "Hey, how can I get some soluble fiber into the diet? One, because that's going to help protect my liver." That soluble fiber helps bind onto things. So if we have a bunch of carbohydrate, for example, coming in with our meal that's going to bind that carbohydrate, it's not going to completely prevent absorption, but it's going to slow it down and it's going to be a healthy pace where you don't have this tremendous shock to your liver and your blood sugar. We were just talking about the glycemic response. So those soluble fibers help blunt that blood sugar response. And then not only do you want to protect your liver, but you also want to be thinking, how can I feed my gut?
How can I feed those microbes? And those are going to be the fermentable fibers. So the FOS and annulin, everything we're talking about. Microbes, we can't break those down on our own. Those have to travel through the gut to the colon where those microbes will ferment those fibers for us, produce great things like short-change fatty acids and butyrate, which is anti-inflammatory and important signaling molecule, but now you're feeding those microbes and they're generating all those wonderful metabolites that we can't produce and feeding those to our bodies. So I think that's the simplest breakdown for the average Joe out there.

Momo:
Love it. All right guys, we need to move to the next topic. Let's go to oxalates and maybe spend a little less time because it's such a narrow topic. Janell or Grant, please take this one on and please explain to people, to our audience about oxalates and how we can minimize their negative effects.

Grant:
Yeah, let's talk about anti-nutrients. Oxalates Lectins, you hear about these things in the blogs and the podcasts. There's a lot of hype around certain antutrients, but there's also some real science. At Viome, we've decided to double click on oxalates because we believe that or the science supports that oxalates can be detrimental to both our digestion and to our general health. So what are oxalates? They're molecules that plants, they're really ubiquitous in the plant kingdom and they help plants regulate minerals. Momo, you might be better at this as a biochemist. I don't know if they're transport molecules, but I just know that it helps plants regulate mineral flux. And so you'll find them throughout the plant kingdom, but some plants happen to be especially high. And Spanish is kind of the poster child for this very high in oxalate content. But what happens when you ingest these foods, excuse me, those free oxalates can actually bind to the nutrients in our meals.
So if you consume a mule with spinach, for example, that's high in oxalate, a lot of those minerals, your calcium, your magnesium, those oxalates can bind. And then that prevents the absorption of those minerals. Secondarily, the oxalates themselves can be absorbed. So they can make it through the gut lining, make it into circulation where there they continue to disrupt the mineral metabolism, but then they can also contribute to things like kidney stones. And actually they're a very common type of kidney stone is oxalate-based kidney stone. So the trick here is we as humans aren't good at metabolizing the oxalates and we really rely on the microbiome to do that work for us. And there's certain species that can do that work. We will assess your microbiome when you test with thiom and see are you a good oxalate metabolizer or rather is your microbiome a good oxalate metabolizer?
Are they helping you break down those oxalates so that one, they don't interfere with your nutrient absorption and two, you're unlikely to have the downstream negative impact on your kidney health. And so the score will assess for that. And if we find that actually your microbiome is not efficient at metabolites and oxalates, then we're going to pull back on those foods that are highest. And again, that doesn't mean we're going to pull up black on all plants, but which foods are especially high in oxalates.
Guru spoke to the food ontology that we have that we actually know the macro and micronutrient contents and other novel molecules like oxalates. And so there's certain thresholds that the clinical nutrition team sets to say, "Hey, these are low, medium, and high foods and oxalates. Let's pull back on these for the short term. Remember, this is never a forever thing." And this is, "Hey, based off the microbiome activity we're assessing for now, let's pull back on those foods, especially high in oxalates and then maybe bring in some other foods and supplements to help with those pathways."

Janelle:
So you can get a sense of like instead of a spinach salad, maybe an arugula salad is going to be a better option for you while we work on that gut microbiome. I actually have a friend and this was a number of years ago when spinach smoothies were really big, like everyone was making spinach smoothies. And so she was like, "I'm going to get healthy and every day I'm going to make a smoothie." And she was making it with spinach and almond butter and almond milk all high in oxalates and she ended up with kidney stones unfortunately. And it was a real bummer of like, "Hey, I'm on this health journey and I'm actively working on this in my life and I just got a big setback." And so that's where understanding your gut microbiome, your unique biology can help you avoid some of those pitfalls.

Momo:
And Janelle, are there any supplements that we recommend for people who have a poor oxalate metabolism?

Janelle:
We do. So of course we can provide minerals that maybe help to bind some of that, but we also do have probiotics and we have some strains of probiotics that help with that oxalate metabolism within the gut.

Momo:
Amazing. Okay, great. This was a great topic. So people need to test and understand what their oxalate metabolism is like. And if it's of concern, our Viome recommendation engine will tell them exactly what to do and what not to do, which is just as important. Let's move to the next topic, which is a hot one. It's the butyrate. So we want to talk about this magical molecule called butyrate and how we can help our customers stimulate butyrate production because it's such a healthy molecule. So can you please discuss that a little bit?

Grant:
Yeah. We need butyrate IVs, don't we? When is that going to happen? Just like hook me up. It's such an amazing signaling molecule. It's such an important molecule.

Momo:
But we also need it in the colon because it actually feeds the intestinal lining cells. So you need it in both places.

Grant:
That's right. And we need that microbiome to be that metabolic factory that's cranking it out. And that's really the power of the microbiome. It's that little metabolic factory we all have in and our gut. Yeah. So Janelle, do you want to talk about how maybe we test for that or what do we want to talk about first?

Momo:
Yeah, let's talk about how we quantify. Let's talk about how we quantify butyrate.

Janelle:
Yeah. So we can look at butyrate from a couple different angles and of course we're looking at RNA. So we're looking at the activity of our microbes. And so we can say, is there butyrate activity going on or are microbes actively producing butyrate? But we can also look at what microbes are there and we know there's known microbes that produce butyrate. So you want to have those microbes and you want them to be working for you and it's really a two-piece system. And depending on what's going on again within your unique gut, we can target it with different approaches. Now if we see someone that, hey, the microbes are there, but they're just not working well for you, how can we provide the nutrients that they need to start making that butyrate? And so then we're going to look at some of the fibers we talked about earlier.
Apple pectin is a really good one. So eat your apples with the skin on them, make sure you wash them. And we can look at whole grains, sprouted wheat bread, things like that that are going to provide that fiber, which is like that fuel that your microbes can then use to produce the butyrate.

Momo:
I want to say something, Janelle, here, because this is an exciting topic and my mouth is salivating right now. Sprouted wheat bread. I'm not really sure that people know what that is, but sprouted wheat bread is like an ancient way of making bread where you don't need a mill. You basically take whole grain, whole groats. They're called grots, wheat groats. You go buy them from a bulk section of your grocery store for dirt cheap and then you sprout them and there's obviously YouTube videos for that. After they're sprouted, they're actually very soft. And so at that point in time, you could mash them, you could food process them, or you can put them through a meat grinder. That's what we do. That's what we use our meat grinder for. It's actually for sprouted wheat, not for meat. And you get this mash and then that's basically the starter of your dough and you can make a sour dough from that or you can just make a bread right there and it's absolutely fabulous texture and it's just loaded with nutrients loaded including all these fibers with, I guess you said, minimal gas and bloating, right?
Yeah.

Janelle:
Yeah. I love that.

Guru:
Mobile, that sounds amazing. I'm going to try that myself. I'm not a big bread guy, but I will try this because it sounds amazing. Delicious. And just want to mention that my wife just bought into our house a sprouter, a little sprouting thing, which is basically, it's like an inclined cylinder which has water in it and it has kind of a container to allow the dripping to happen and everything, but it's airs and it waters kind of at the same time. It just accelerates the sprouting process. And we use that for sprouting literally everything that we can sprout.

Momo:
Okay. I grew up with just a baking sheet. That was our sprouter.

Janelle:
I do that as well at home guru. I love it. I love having fresh sprouts.

Grant:
Right,

Janelle:
Right. Yeah. That's awesome. And

Grant:
Going back to butyrate real fast, back to the science. Yes, yes. Well, no, I love this stuff, but
Going back to the score, I think it's important because there are other tests out there that will measure butyrate in stool. They'll measure short chain fatty acids and they'll try to quantify the butyrate and the percentage of certain fatty acids in the stool. But I want to just double click on that for a minute. And in actuality, it's a very poor measurement with very limited utility. There's a very rapid turnover of these short-chain fatty acids that's happening in the gut. And by the time the stool is actually being collected, microbes have been in our gut has been absorbing this stuff and to date we still don't have at least clinically a good assay or biomarker for measuring butyrate either in the gut or in the blood. There's some metabolomics and things you can do that are advanced and very expensive, but they're not commonly accessed.
And so I think what we can do with this score is far superior than trying to actually measure the butyrate install. And Momo, you certainly can speak more to this, but you're getting that live snapshot of what your microbes are actually doing instead of trying to chase the metabolite that's a little bit of a ghost, if I'm being honest with butyrate.

Momo:
Yeah, great. So in summary, in my mind, what Viome does is we quantify all of the microorganisms that are capable of producing butyrate, but we also quantify how much butyrate they're actually producing using our RNA technology. And then based on those data, we can personalize their fiber intake because not all fibers are the same and they're not going to feed the same microbes. So we can personalize fiber input so that someone is not taking extra fiber that's actually not being utilized by their gut microbiome and potentially causes bloating and other problems, but we're really matching their fiber intake with their microbiome knowing that their microbiome is going to produce butyrate from those fibers. So that's really, really cool, but we need to move on to the next topic, which

Guru:
Is- I think Momo, there's one important point I want to make before we move to the next topic. Let's do it. Is that we discuss the idea of butyrate producing bacteria that are active in your gut that might be producing and we want to stimulate it and encourage it to do more, but we've discussed in previous episodes that these organisms can be doing many different things.

Momo:
Oh, absolutely.

Guru:
And so don't just rely on the presence of an organism. And we keep coming back to that point over and over because there's a lot of tests in the market that simply say, "Hey, here are all the list of things that list of organisms in your gut." That's not good enough.

Guru:
We really need to see is whether they're expressing the genes related to buturate production and more generally short-chain fatty acid production,
Then you want to see the level of expression so that you know the level of activity of the short-chain fatty acid such as buturate production. And that is the unique thing that Viome is able to do that no one else does in the market today. And it's a super important point because don't get fooled into thinking that just because you have a burate producing bacteria like the bacillus coagulants or whatever other organisms other people might tell you or buturate producers, it's not guaranteed that they will produce butyrate until you actually see their activity and their expression.

Momo:
Very good point, Guru. Very good point. Allright, next topic. This is a hot one, mitochondria. We have so many podcasts and so many influencers now talking about mitochondrial health and longevity. That's it. That's all you have to worry about, but it's obviously not that simple. So can you guys introduce mitochondria and mitochondrial functions to our audience and explain how Viomes tests can measure and support mitochondrial functions?

Grant:
Yeah, absolutely. So right now we're shifting from sample to sample and at Viome with our full body intelligence test, you're actually testing three sample types, stool blood and saliva. When we're looking at the blood, we can start to look at that human gene expression and that mitochondrial gene expression. And we have scores that actually will look at the efficiency of your mitochondria in producing energy and turning over free radicals and combating oxidative stress as well as mitochondrial biogenesis, which is this idea of mitochondria growing and expanding and replicating to serve all the needs of the cell. And if you think about certain cell types like neurons or cardiomyocytes that are really kidney cells, they really require a lot of energy and rely on those mitochondria. And it's not just about your muscles. We think about muscles all the time and endurance athletes and yeah, absolutely very important.
And we all know VO2Max, great proxy for one of the strongest markers for assessing longevity and health span, lifespan. But even those other organs and cell types, they have a lot of energy demands and anytime mitochondria can't keep pace with the energy demands of the cells, then that can lead to dysfunction. So we always want to make sure that the biogenesis pathways are active and supported and like I just said, that your cells, your organs, your tissues are getting all the energy they need from these very important organelles.

Momo:
All right. So mitochondria are basically little compartments in human cells that are producing energy and they're using either carbohydrates or fats and they're producing ATP as an energy source and we can actually quantify the functions and the biogenesis, meaning the generation of new mitochondria using our blood test. So now when we see the results and we create these scores for an individual, how does that translate into what they should do in the kitchen?

Janelle:
Yeah, good question. When I think of our mitochondrial health, our energy production that we look at at Viome, I always think it's more about what you should eat than what you shouldn't. And while it's not going to be quite the same as avoiding broccoli for that sulfide gas, the mitochondria need a lot of antioxidant support. And so we really want to focus on those foods rich in antioxidants. We talk about resveratrol a lot. You think of grapes or people think of red wine with resveratrol. You can do that with foods and with supplement as well, but other nutrients as well like CoQ10 can help with that energy production side of it. So thinking about dark JUUL colored fruits and vegetables is going to be really key for your mitochondrial support. In terms of what we're looking at at avoiding, of course, we want to avoid all of the things that none of us should be having.
This kind of falls into the foods everyone should avoid. So highly processed foods, high fructose corn syrup, those types of things are going to cause more oxidative stress on your cells and that's damaging to our mitochondria. And so that kind of falls into that bucket. But hey, how can we look at personalizing those pathways to say what antioxidants are best for my cells right now?

Momo:
All right. Grant, do you have anything to add?

Grant:
Yeah. Outside of the foods, I think this is an area where supplements can be really beneficial because we can be very targeted with bringing the supplement ingredients in to help different aspects of mitochondrial health. So absolutely oxidative stress mitochondria are very sensitive to oxidative stress. So they've built all these mechanisms to help combat it. And at the same time, our cells have become reliant on those mitochondria to provide that service in battling free radicals and that oxidative stress for the entire cell. So this is the link between the mitochondria and cellular health tissue health organ health is the healthier your mitochondria are and the more efficient they are at these processes, then the healthier, more resilient your cells are going to be. And so bringing in things like L-carnitine, acetyl-L carnitine, the great nutrient that we can bring in and actually helps. We talked about carbohydrates and fatty acids, but we really want those mitochondria burning as much fatty acid as they can.
I always think of it as our furnace. And if you think of carbohydrates for the body, the body really doesn't have to do anything to process carbohydrates. It's very simple. Any of that glucose that's floating through, it can use that, it can immediately use it for energy. And it's almost analogous to going in and turning on your thermostat, "Hey, I'm going to go turn on the heater. I'm cold in the house. I'm going to go turn on the heater." That's kind of what carbohydrates are. The body doesn't have to do a lot, but burning fatty acids, there is some work to do. We got to break down those fatty acids and those mitochondria need to process them. And that's more anogus to going out. Now we've got to chop some wood, bring the wood in, start a fire, get the fire going, now I'm going to get the warmth and benefit.
So that's kind of the difference. But we always want to be stimulating that fatty acid or those fatty acid pathways. L-carnitine can help facilitate that. It actually works as a shuttle to bring those fatty acids into the mitochondria so they can be processed and hit that electron chain so we can, again, get the energy from those fatty acids and benefit other things like PNAC to help again with the oxidative stress, various nutrients where we can hit the pathways and then also stimulate those biogenesis pathways from the cyclic AMP and verbarin, for example, kind of popular on TikTok acting as a GLP-1 supplement, but also stimulating those mitochondria and supporting that biogenesis.

Janelle:
Grant, this is kind of an area to me where it comes together how important it is to look at that full body analysis because I think if, hey, I want to support my mitochondria and I go just buy a supplement off the shelf, it's going to maybe have NAC in it and NR and some of those carnitine, some of those ones you discussed, but that's not necessarily right for everyone. And if we understand what's going on in other areas, our oral health, our gut health, other parts of our cellular health, we may know that, hey, that generic blend is not quite right for me.

Grant:
Absolutely right. And that's what we've been talking about, right? When you test and you see that high sulfide gas in AC probably isn't going to be an option for you. We talked about methane gas and TMA production, that acetyl-carditine might not be good for you. So by doing the testing and looking at these other aspects, you can really fine tune those supplement protocols so you can be still targeted and effective, but also do no harm. And so how can we adjust that mitochondrial formula to where your mitochondria and your cells get that benefit, but we're not disrupting any activities in your gut or even in your mouth. So it's that fine-tuning is what the platform allows for and it's really next level when you start to think about it.

Momo:
I love it.

Guru:
Hey guys, can I just mention a really cool fact because it blows my mind every time I think about it is that since we talked about a lot of microbiome type stuf. The evolutionary point that mitochondria were in the way, way, way distant past actually microbes, which were so symbiotic with the human organism that they ended up getting really incorporated into our cells just as a kind of recruit them for energy production. And now we have this factory for energy production and it's so amazing when you think about it and they have their own genome. It's a small number of genes and everything, but it's still such an important element of our human metabolism that I just wanted to recap that point.

Momo:
I mean, all these things are mind blowing. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I also want to mention one more little peculiarity to add on top of what Grain said, which is carnitine. So carnitine can support mitochondrial function, but it can also cause production of TMA in the gut, which can lead to TMAO, which is one of the most powerful causes of cardiovascular disease. And so if you're taking loads of carnitine, which is now ubiquitous, you can buy many drinks that have carnitine. If you are just blindly eating carnitine without knowing whether it's actually beneficial to you, it could be actually causing heart disease without any benefit to you. And so the only way you're going to know that is if you test both your stool and your blood with our test, because the stool will tell you how much TMA you're making from carnitine and our blood test will tell you how necessary that carnitine is for shuttling of fatty acids for beta oxidation and mitochondria.
And so it's the balance of those two. And without that test, you literally have no idea.
Yeah.
Awesome. All right, one more topic and then we'll have to close it down. And so let's talk about GABA. Gamma aminobutyric acidThat's a mouthful. Let's stick with GABA. So Janelle and bread.

Grant:
I'll let you catch that one Janelle.

Momo:
Let's bring this topic to the audience.

Janelle:
I'll stay with GABA. GABA is kind of like a calming neurotransmitter, right? Really important for our mood and kind of reduce some of those excitatory signals, keep us balanced there. There is some GABA that's produced in our gut and so we can look at those microbes and that pathway activity and be able to see most importantly, there's a direct connection and maybe you guys have already talked about this before, but our brain and our gut are directly connected and we have the vagus nerve running in between them. And so when we talk about issues, anxiety, depression, IBS, all of those types of things, we know that there's a connection within the gut because our gut and our brain are always communicating with each other. And so we don't want to forget about that aspect of what's going on there when treating our mental health as well.
For GABA in the gut, our building block is glutamate. And so that's an amino acid. You're going to find that in a lot of foods. If we're seeing a low activity of that within your gut, we can provide some of the foods that have more free glutamate, a little bit easier to access for those microbes. Fermented foods can be a good option. Things like miso, aged cheeses, but of course you're going to find it in a lot of your protein foods as well. But I also like to look at, hey, where can we get those biotics? And those microbes that can help produce GABA, you can actually get in fermented foods. And so we want to be able to include fermented foods in our diet as well and introduce more of those microbes into the gut. Kimchi, yogurts, of course, sourdough bread. You can find some of those microbes there.

Momo:
Amazing. Okay. Well, if GABA is an excitement molecule, I must have a lot of it. So that's not a bad thing necessarily.

Guru:
Everything is hot for you, Momo. So that's what it means.

Momo:
Many things are hot. Yes.

Guru:
Yes.

Momo:
Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, Janelle and Grant, so much, and let's move on to the next topic, Guru.

Guru:
Yeah, thank you guys. So actually I would like you to stick around while I do a little demo of some of the recommendations that we have in the app as well as some of the advanced features in the app that takes the food recommendations, turns them into recipes that people can immediately implement in the kitchen and takes it even further and makes it possible to shop directly from our app and then takes it one more step and allows you to create a plan for the whole week and so on. So for this, all of these things are integrated into the Viome app. Now, I want to give you a quick snapshot of how our mobile app looks like. This is a picture, actually four different screenshots I took earlier today about how our app looks like, the mobile app. So you see this is my own personal data, by the way, which I'm happy to share with all of you.
So you see on the left panel, it tells me first of all that there is a way to understand all the recommendations and results that I'm getting through this thing called the playbook, which is actually a super fun experience for most people. I have had a lot of fun. I can show it maybe in some other episode, but today we are going to switch directly. You see at the bottom, you see the nutrition tab. When you click on the nutrition down here, you see the foods and recommendations that we were talking about in this episode, which you can see all of your super foods, you can see the enjoy foods, the minimize and avoid foods. There's actually ways to filter these foods and look at things that you're interested in specifically for whatever activity you're doing like cooking or shopping or anything like that. You can also set toggles.
For example, I'm a vegetarian, so I set the vegetarian toggles. So I only see the vegetarian versions of all the food recommendations, not the full meat thing, but for those of your Omniverse, please look at everything and decide what works for you, what doesn't work for you. And there is, if you scroll down on that same page, which I'm going to show you in the web version of the app, there is a recipe section. When you click on that, you see this third panel I'm showing you where it takes a couple of thousand of different recipes that we've already tested in Vio and it selects those recipes that are perfect for you by giving this score up here. You see this 15-minute vegetarian curry is one of the recipes that it picked for me because it's got a score of 94, which basically means that it has many of the superfoods and enjoy foods that are great for me and it does not include the avoid foods and the minimized foods.
So you can actually look at the number of superfoods that's a green, three of them, number of enjoy foods. That's five over here. I actually double clicked on this and you can see it on the right-hand side. You can see all my blue and the green superfoods and enjoy foods. And it tells you if you scroll down from that same thing, it'll tell you exactly how to prepare that particular dish. And down here you see the shop with Instacart. So you can actually click the Instacart button. I've done this by the way and it's amazing because it just puts all of these ingredients into my cart and then I say order it and then an hour later or two hours later somebody knocks on my door with all those ingredients and I can just make the dish right then, right then and there. It's an amazing feeling.
And there's two very important features that I wanted to point out. One of them is the up here, you see the Viome AI guide at the top, you see there's an icon up here on the front page, the nutrition page and so on. You click on that and you can actually ask questions. If you don't understand why something is in your recommendation list, you can say, okay, I want to know why this thing is good for me or not good for me or whatever that's at the top over here. And then the other thing you can see here is the Instacart that I mentioned earlier down below on the right-hand side where you can literally connect it to your regular daily shopping routine and so on and so forth. So with that background, the easier thing for me to demo for you is actually my web-based application that looks slightly different than the mobile application, but it's easier for me to demonstrate here on the podcast.
So this is my front page on the web. So you can see your same information either on your mobile phone or on your laptop browser, which is what I'm showing you right now, the web app. And you can see all of the information down here. This is the recipes section. It tells you what my scores are and a combination of all of those things. But if I go into my nutrition section, you see my food, superfood, enjoy food, everything. And if I go into all foods, I should be able to see every single individual food and you'll see filters here for many things Like the food groups, the health zones, other kinds of things like your blood sugar response, which we've talked about quite a bit and you can select some of these things and apply it. But I want to go back to my recipe generator, which when I click on it, it thinks about it a litle bit and here is my list of recipes, which is so exciting for me because I'm always thinking, "Okay, what am I going to make on Saturday?" And so if I click on one of these recipes, which happens to be a really nice saucy tofu over polenta, which has a really good score and you can see there are three superfoods, five enjoy foods.
There's a whole bunch of instructions here about how best to do that. There are chef notes and obviously this is fully personalized for me. And suppose it's not enough for me to just say, "Okay, here's the recipe that I want to cook." I can go back to the AI assistant, which is down here. I click on it and I say, okay, I start a new conversation. I say, "Create a seven-day meal plan for me so I can get my super foods and remove my avoid and minimize foods. Be concise, just so that we can all see how this works and it'll think for a little bit and then it'll come back with a plan and it says, okay, this is my seven-day plan and here it prioritizes my superfoods and enjoy foods. It excludes my minimize and avoid foods. It says for day one, breakfast, do this.
For day two breakfast, do this, day three, and so on and so forth." So I kept it concise, but I can say give me breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it'll give me the entire thing. And I can actually say, okay, give me a recipe or method of preparation for any one of these dishes. And it'll tell me it's step one, do this, step two, do this, and so forth. So basically the combination of all of these tools that we are showing you should give you all the tools necessary for you to be able to not only test with Viome, but actually convert the recommendations we make into daily practices for yourself at home in an easy to consume fashion and easy to implement fashion so you don't have to rat your brains on it and do lots of research every day and all of that stuff.
Everything is inside your app. And of course, you can also take it with you when you go to a restaurant or you can take it with you when you go to your grocery store and figure out what you need to buy and what you can order and so on and so forth. So that is the power of the integrated approach that you get with Viome.

Momo:
Love it.

Janelle:
Guru, I'll just make one more plug for the recipes. I love them. It's something that we've been developing for a while and they're chef created, they're delicious and they're pretty simple. So when we talked about implementing your plan, this is a really actionable way to do that. And sometimes it's hard to get out of our routine. We're used to eating the same thing every day for breakfast, but our microbes like diversity in the diet. And so when you're eating a wide range of plant foods, especially within your enjoy list and your superfood list, you're going to be able to provide your body with a lot of different nutrients and different types of fiber for your microbes. And so I would just encourage people to jump in here and try a new recipe every once in a while.

Grant:
And I love to actually invert it and sort it by a lowest score and then look at those lowest recipes and then see how it could actually make them better for me because we give the replacements for those avoid foods that give it the low score, but it actually will give you the ideas that, hey, you can swap out that beef with tofu or name the ingredient. So don't forget about maybe those lesser rated recipes. There's still options for you and we're going to give you those substitutions. I love the-

Guru:
Great points. Great point. Guys, thank you so much. I look at this regularly so I can get ideas and sometimes I combine things. I take some ideas from one and another idea from another one, put it together and make it work. So experiment, have fun, live a healthy life.

Grant:
Those pancakes look delicious, by the way. The great thing.

Guru:
Amazing. Yeah. It's lunchtime actually where I am. So I think I'm going to go grab something soon.
Janelle, thank you, Grant. Really appreciate you guys being here and we're going to have so much fun with improving this system even further when we get feedback from our viewers and feedback from our users and so forth. And we'll keep adding more functionality, making it easier to use, making it more concise and applicable in your everyday life.

Momo:
Great. That could be actually a monthly challenge in the future for the audience to actually make suggestions for improvement and the suggestion we like the best would be the winner.

Guru:
Great idea, Momo. Let's record that. So Grant and Janelle, thank you so much. You can drop off at this point and Momo and I will finish up the show.

Momo:
Thank you, Grant and Janelle.

Grant:
Thank you guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

Momo:
Bye-bye. Bye. All right, Guru, next topic is questions from the audience. So I picked one question that I thought was very important because protein is just about the hottest item right now in the podcast/influencer circuit and just everyone's pumping protein, all the products are now full of protein. So one of the audience members asked that the FBI test, the full body intelligence test tells us whether we're consuming too much protein because too much protein consumption can actually lead to many health issues. So how would they be able to know and see that on the app? And so if you go to your app and you look at the scores, there are three scores that are quantifying protein fermentation and those are called ammonia production pathways, putrescine production pathways, and protein fermentation. And so those are the three and you can ask that chatbot that we have built in to find them if you'd like and then show you what the score is for you. And if any one of those three is very poor like attention, you may want to reduce your protein levels and then retest and see what's going on.
If two or three of them are in a very poor state, then that's a really strong warning signal and that should be balanced obviously with your other needs and whether you're doing resistance training, whether you're on GLP-1, all kinds of things.

Guru:
Yeah, Momo, thank you. That was an important question and definitely on the mindset of a lot of people, especially given the hype around protein consumption and all of that stuff. So thank you for that. So in closing, let me just remind everybody about our June monthly challenge, which is to just post a question in any one of our podcasts and we will pick a winner based on the best question and what will help the most people and so on and so forth. So wow,

Momo:
That's the easiest challenge ever.

Guru:
Exactly.

Momo:
We make it easy here. Awesome.

Guru:
With that, I think we're going to close this episode. I'm Guru, an AI expert.
Momo:
And I'm Momo, a biochemist. We're two PhDs on a pod.
Bye now.

Momo:

Bye.