On this episode, explore the fascinating world of the human microbiome, its functions, and its impact on health with experts Momo and Guru. Discover exactly how microbes influence everything from vitamin production to immune response and how to optimize your microbiome for better health.
Transcript:
Guru:
Hey Momo, quick answers. Are germs dangerous?
Momo:
A few are, but most of them are not.
Guru:
Okay. Is there such a thing as a healthy microbiome?
Momo:
Absolutely. But it's not what you think it is.
Guru:
Oh, I want to know more about that. Next question. Can poop cure cancer?
Momo:
Yes.
Guru:
What?
Momo:
Wait,
Guru:
Wait. Did you say that germs are not dangerous?
Momo:
Some are, but many of them are your best friends.
Guru:
I agree, Momo. People always say a dog is a man's best friend, but I actually agree with you that your microbiome is probably your best friend.
Momo:
Yep.
Guru:
A dog might just go fetch your slippers or something, but my gut bacteria literally manufacture my serotonin. Try getting your golden retriever to synthesize a neurotransmitter.
Momo:
Huh. That's a good one. That's a good dad joke.
Guru:
Well, it's not just a dad joke. It's a pH dad joke. Okay?
Momo:
PH dad.
Guru:
Listen, if you don't feed your dog, he may ruin your rug or something, but if I don't feed my microbiome, it basically ruins my metabolic pathways. It spites my inflammation, it tanks my mood. I know who the real boss in that relationship is.
Momo:
That is great, Guru. I am Momo, a biochemist.
Guru:
And I'm Guru, an AI expert. We're two PhDs on a POD. And on today's episode, we are not talking about dogs, but we are talking about your actual best friends. The trillions of microbes living inside your gut and how you can be a great host to them.
Momo:
I am excited about this one. So let's get started with what's on your radar, Guru.
Guru:
Well, last episode I mentioned Hail Mary. It's still on my radar because I'm going to go to the movie tomorrow. And speaking of microbes and your microbiome, there's going to be a whole bunch of microbiome space microbiome on this movie. So I'm super excited about that.
Momo:
Because of your recommendation, I actually booked my wife and I for the same movie next Tuesday in an IMAX theater. So I'm also very excited. It was the first day that had decent seats. Until then, all the good seats are gone.
Guru:
Momo, I know that you don't go to movies regularly, but I will guarantee you you will enjoy this.
Momo:
I mean, no need for a guarantee, but based on your recommendation, I did it, but I haven't been to the movies in many, many years. So this is a very special thing for me.
Guru:
Listen, man, this is a good one to break that whole spell, okay? Or
Momo:
Whatever. It's a choice, but yeah, you can call it a spell if you'd like.
Guru:
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. The second thing I wanted to mention on my radar was I've been using this new AI tool called CloudCode, which is similar to many other AI tools that are out there like Cursor and Copilot and what have you. I really love CloudCode. I think they really hit the spot on how to interact with developers like myself. And I've actually been doing a whole bunch of interesting stuff with it, so I'm having a lot of fun.
Momo:
Geeking out on the weekends. Oh
Guru:
My. Weekends, evenings, whenever I get a chance, between meetings, whatever, I geek out and I'm having a lot of fun.
Momo:
Amazing.
Guru:
And the third thing is I am super excited about getting some of our Viome tests in the hands of doctors. So we have a Precision Health Pro test, which is a very comprehensive, I would call it a preventive care screening that most doctors can use. If you're focused on preventive care, you'll probably love to use this test because it gives you an insight into the molecular biology that may impact early signs of many diseases, like more than a dozen diseases. So that would be a good starting point to go through other care paths you may have over time.
Momo:
Yeah. I mean, Guru, there is absolutely no way that I can explain to anyone how excited I am about that product because when I first envisioned the entire platform and the entire mission of iOM back in 2010, this was in my mind. This product was in my mind. How do we integrate nutrition into healthcare? For every patient, every age, every situation, independent of whatever the reason is for a patient provider interaction, they should integrate nutrition and it has to be personalized biology-driven nutrition. And then using the molecular data that we're using to identify risk factors for diseases years and decades before any symptoms come on, and then enable people to actually work on those molecular signatures to reverse them back to healthy. I mean, this is a quantum leap and I am just so happy that we're here and obviously you have made such an important, heavy contribution to this whole area.
It's just been- As
Guru:
Have you.
Momo:
An incredible, incredible journey. So thank you so much.
Guru:
Amazing. Amazing. Thank
Momo:
You.
Guru:
Thank you, Momo. And you got to tell us what's on your radar MoMAR.
Momo:
All right. I've selected just three topics here for today because there's too many, but I had a colonoscopy two days ago and this is both a sort of, we can talk fun about it, but it's also a very serious thing. I think that people over 45 really need to take it seriously. A screening colonoscopy should be free under most or all healthcare plans in the United States for people over 45. So take advantage of that and get it done because colorectal cancer is very prevalent and its incidence is growing and specifically it's growing in younger populations. So even if you're under 45, if you have worrisome symptoms that have not been resolved, you may want to do a colonoscopy. And
Guru:
It's deadly, right? So what is the five-year survival rate?
Momo:
It depends on the stage, of course. And so if you catch it early, stage one and two before it spreads, then it's relatively curable. It's very curable, in fact. But if you catch it too late, and that's the key about the colonoscopy is that it'll catch it early where you can basically cure yourself. If you catch it too late in stages three and four, then the prognosis is very poor. And so the polyps that are discovered during colonoscopy are a necessary transition state to go to cancer. And so if you do a colonoscopy and they cut out the polyps, you're fine for three, five, or 10 years, depending on what the findings are, but you know that you will not get cancer. How lucky are we? Because for unfortunate people who get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, they didn't have that opportunity. They were just told they have cancer and they have less than a year to live.
With colorectal cancer, you actually have an opportunity to prevent it, which is great. So go and get it and just set your expectations that the two days surrounding the colonoscopy are going to be very unpleasant.
Guru:
I have heard about that and I don't look forward to it myself, but Mobo, turning it around, I think the work that we are doing with colon polyps is another episode that we should have in the future. I think there's a whole bunch of science and practice that we need to go through in that whole episode. But tell me, what else is on your radar?
Momo:
Yeah, I agree with you. And I just want to say that until Viome or someone else provides a better solution, colonoscopy is currently the gold standard, best preventive tool for colorectal cancer. Take advantage of it and go get it done. All right. Next topic is don't forget about our challenge from the previous episode and the winner gets a free FBI kit.
Guru:
Excellent. So remember what you have to do, you have to get ingredients for a meal for less than four US dollars. Then you have to cook the meal, take a picture of that and post that in the comments of the previous episode, episode number two, or actually you know what? Post it on any episode. It doesn't matter. Exactly. We'll get you and we will announce the lucky winner in the next one or two episodes.
Momo:
Great. And then the last is don't forget to subscribe. That helps you find our future episodes and helps us with promoting our platform.
Guru:
All right, Momo. So let's get into the substance of this episode. And just to level set here, my name is Guru, but I am going to be the Shisha, which is the student, and you're going to be the guru. So you're going to teach me about the microbiome. So let's start from the basics, right? What exactly is a microbiome and what specifically is the human microbiome?
Momo:
Awesome. So a microbiome just means a population of different microbes that live in some environment. And so you can have a microbiome of a deep ocean vent. You can have a microbiome of soil. You can have any kind of, pretty much any environment that we have not sterilized has pretty much a microbiome to it. Now, the human microbiome is specifically all of the microbes that live on our surfaces and inside of us. And so we have different types of microbiomes on our body and in our body. So people will hear about things like skin microbiome, vaginal microbiome, oral microbiome, nasopharyngeal microbiome. Gut microbiome, of course, is the most famous, is probably the most important for our health, but you can have a microbiome almost anywhere. There's even talks about the blood microbiome and the central nervous system microbiome and the placental microbiome and fetal microbiome.
All those terms, we're not going to delve into those as much. We're going to focus on gut microbiome and oral microbiome, but if the audience has questions about any other microbiomes, we're obviously happy to discuss.
Guru:
Let me ask you something. So I am told that there are essentially some remnants of microbes even inside your cells, right? Like maybe your mitochondria was some kind of a microbe way in the distant past and it
Momo:
Became
Guru:
Embedded within our cells. And I'm even told that there's these funky viral sequences and so forth that can embed itself in your DNA. So microbes are literally everywhere. So can you even say that all of those are part of the microbiome or not really?
Momo:
No, they're not. They're integrated into our own genome. So they were separate entities millions or hundreds of millions of years ago, and they've integrated themselves into us and they've become us, but they are microbial remnants. And so humans are a result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. And in the very, very early evolution, the eukaryotic cells basically adopted prokaryotic cells or bacteria inside of them and those eventually turned into mitochondria. And so today people hear the term mitochondria. They have a microbial origin. They did not evolve from the human body. And then the second part that you- Hold on.
Guru:
So eukaryotic means cells that have a nucleus and prokaryotic means cells that do not have a nucleus. Is that correct?
Momo:
Yeah, that is one of the differences. Absolutely. Yes.
Guru:
What are the other
Momo:
Differences? Yeah. I mean, in general, the differences are that eukaryotic cells have different organelles. So they're compartmentalized. So they have the nucleus, but they have other organelles like mitochondria, Golgi apparatus and so on, different compartments. Whereas a prokaryotic cell just has one compartment and everything is happening in that one cell. That's one of the differences. Other differences are that in general, prokaryotes are much smaller in size. They have much smaller genomes. They have many fewer genes. They mutate much more rapidly. So they don't have high fidelity in terms of DNA integrity. So they make lots of mutations and that's a part of their nature and a part of their adaptability to the environment. Whereas eukaryotes have much better DNA damage repair systems, they have much longer genomes. So there are many differences. We can discuss those in a future episode.
Guru:
That actually leads me to ask you about the different types of microbes. So there are microbes that could be considered procarios, microbes that could be considered uchoreotes, correct?
Momo:
There are, yes, you're right. Okay. So let's go into the types of microbes, but I do want to go back to one question that you asked me that I didn't expect, which is that we have viruses in our genome. That is a super fascinating and mostly belongs to the we don't know what we don't know sort of a thing. But estimates are that up to 50% of all of our genomic information, our entire genome is actually a viral origin, which is crazy.
But regardless of the actual number, a very significant portion of our genome is a viral origin. And these viruses are called retroviruses. And they're very unique from other viruses in that they have the ability to integrate into our genome. And so over millions and hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution, they've been integrating into our genome. And by the way, HIV is the most well-known representative of that type of virus, but these retroviruses have integrated into our genome and they are expressing their genes in all of our cells. Exactly. And these gene expressions have been found to be associated with a whole slew of diseases and health states, protective states. Interesting. But we don't understand the mechanisms. And so, I mean, wow, just human biology has so many different levels. And this is one of those levels that's really kind of on the dark matter side.
Guru:
Got it. Got it. I want to go deeper into that, but I think we should step back.
Momo:
We should step back. I agree. Please
Guru:
Tell me the types of microbes.
Momo:
Exactly. So let's go to a picture here that I have prepared. So this slide captures sort of the variety of microbes that are in our human microbiome. And for the audience that doesn't see the video, I'll explain some of these things. And so viruses and phages are very, very small. They're a few nanometers to a few hundred nanometers in size, so obviously super tiny. Viruses infect either higher level organisms like urokariotes. So there's plant viruses, mammalian viruses, and so on. Whereas phages, they're actually bacteriophages or microphages. They infect these primitive prokaryotic microorganisms, but they all play a role in our health, of course. And then stepping up a size, we go to Archaea, which are a different branch, a different kingdom for bacteria. And Archaan bacteria are very similar in many ways. They're very small, under a micron or a few microns. They have very primitive lifestyle, but they contribute to our metabolism.
And I'm sure you and I will dive deeper into the role of so many different bacteria, but also Archaea because methanobraviabacter Smithia is one of the most well-known microorganisms in the gut microbiome. And it's actually an archaea. It's not a bacteria. So most people don't think about it that way.
Momo:
That I didn't know.
Guru:
Okay.
Momo:
Yeah. And then we have worms and parasites. And so the picture I have here is of a hookworm. It's like a sub-millimeters worm that's a true parasite in our body. And obviously these things have a co-evolutionary effect and they can be beneficial or harmful. So those are the kind of topics we're going to discuss later. And then we have parasites like Giardia-Lambia, which I'm showing here in the picture, which doesn't have any known beneficial aspects. It basically, it gives you bad diarrhea for a month, which nobody's going to like, but there are a whole slew of parasites that we can pick up and some are very serious. Giardia is not super serious, but still super annoying. So this is sort of the repertoire of microbes. They range in size from a few nanometers to a few millimeters, let's say. Some worms are a few millimeters or even longer, and they are a part of us.
And that's really the key takeaway that these things are a part of us. And most of the time they're our best friends, as we discussed. Sometimes they're not welcome.
Guru:
Yeah, Momo. So the ones that are millimeter in length, millimeter or more in length, obviously you can see those with your naked eye. The ones that go into the micrometer length, for that, you need a microscope. For the viruses, just give me a sense, if you walk into a standard lab, will they have a microscope in which you can actually see viruses or not really?
Momo:
No. So you cannot see viruses with an optical microscope. You have to use an electron microscope. So these two are electron micrographs. Yeah, they're too small. About a micron is sort of the minimum, the smallest object you can see with a good optical microscope, about a micron. You can argue that you can go a little more, but you definitely cannot go to the virus side.
Guru:
Got it. Okay. Thank you. What about picking up one of these as an example? Oh, there you have it. Okay, go ahead.
Momo:
Yeah. So as an example, I'm just showing a picture of Akermansium eosinophila, another sort of a microbial superstar. It has some concerning aspects, but for the most part, this is one of the superstars. And you can see here that this is a two micrometer scale here. For those who cannot see it, we're basically showing oval shaped microorganisms called Akermansium eosinophila. And these are around a micron in size, obviously very small. They are one of the essential members of our gut microbiome. We'll talk about that just a little bit later, acquiring it at birth. And we're going to have a whole episode about acquisition of healthy microbes at birth. And this is going to be one of those very, very important ones.
Guru:
Awesome. So these all sound and look fascinating to me, but why do we have the microbiomes? Do we really need it or is that just a parasite that's kind of riding along with us?
Momo:
That's an excellent question. So yeah, I think that discussion about why we have the microbiome is why we acquired it initially is mostly philosophical at this point in time. In my mind, it's very likely that it was not a welcome partner at first, that it was basically parasitic, but that over the course of the evolution, we co-evolved together to where we both benefit from that relationship. And today it's very much a synergistic relationship where they benefit from us and they obviously continue where there's eight billion people. So 70,000 years ago, there were only 10,000 people, so we were not a very important part of their lives, but today we have eight billion people, so we've become a very important part of their lives, and then we have evolved to depend on them. So I would like people to mostly focus on what is the reality today.
And then for those who want to dive deeper into the human microbiome co-evolution, they can read about that and there are some resources for that. And I'm always happy, obviously, to address any questions. But today, what we know is that if we didn't have our microbiome, we could still live, we could still survive. We have enough gene functions encoded in our genome that we can digest foods and we can benefit from carbohydrates, fats, proteins, we can digest those, and we can build our body and we can walk and talk and see. So we can have basic functions. What I would like everyone to understand is that the microbiome elevates us far beyond that. It makes our immune systems far better and more prepared for both new and previously seen microbes. It makes our cognition better, our cognitive capabilities, it makes our mental health better. You talked about producing serotonin early on.
The microbiome either directly produces neurotransmitters or stimulates our body to produce neurotransmitters, and then it improves our physical performance in many ways. And then one thing that we're going to spend some time on is this GLP-1 hormone, which is now one of the hottest things on the planet and how the microbiome and us have co-evolved to actually produce that GLP-1 together, and that's what controls our hunger and satiety. And when that mechanism of interaction between our best friends breaks down, we no longer have the capability to release it and to utilize it, which means that now we need a medication to support that. So think of the microbiome is it's making your life better in every possible way, and that's really the best friendship.
Guru:
So let me ask you, suppose someone is born without a microbiome. So I mean, I know it's very difficult to be without a microbiome, but let's say we have some organism that's born without a microbiome clean, rigt, so to speak.
Momo:
Sterile.
Guru
That's a better Word. So how long would such an organism be able to survive compared to an organism that has a regular healthy microbiome?
Momo:
Yeah. So this experiment has been done with germ-free mice in the laboratories. And so it's not human and it's not like the mice were out exposed to the environment and to the predators and to bacteria. So these mice had a similar lifespan, but in the lab, they don't have to be smart enough to avoid predators. They don't have to be smart enough to find food. They don't have to be resilient to avoid pathogens. And so it's an artificial environment. So it's really not translatable in real life in my mind, but what we now know from human studies is that the gut microbiome and other microbiomes on us have such beneficial elements. They're so beneficial. And when some of those mechanisms break down, we lose our health. That to me is stronger evidence that the microbiome is essential for high quality of life and long health span.
Whether it affects the actual lifespan or not, I don't know if we'll ever do that experiment in humans. Probably not.
Guru:
Yeah, I would think so. So I think what you're saying is that if you as a human ever had no microbiome in your body, you would probably get some kind of infection from some pathogen, some organism, and you may not be able to fight that off because your microbiome has actually helped you fight that off. Is that correct? And if yes, I have a follow-on question.
Momo:
Yeah. Yes, that is the case and many other benefits, not just that one. Yes.
Guru:
So let's just start with that.
Momo:
Yeah.
Guru:
So if I want to consider my microbiome as my best friend, my best friend is helping me fight off all of these pathogens and infections that are found in my environment. So how does that happen? What makes the microbiome help me fight off all of these organisms?
Momo:
Okay. Fascinating topic. We should definitely have a whole episode on this specific question, but let's do high level highlights. So first of all, oral and gut microbiome form a very tight community that works together and they do not like intruders. And so they prevent other intruders by working together, consuming the food rapidly that's available, harvesting, for example, iron from the environment. And so basically preventing utilization of nutrients by foreigners, because they've already established that. And then they will also produce antibiotics that will prevent others from coming in. So the
Ones that
Are already established understand each other's antibiotics and they are resistant to each other's antibiotics. And then when a newcomer comes in, it's not necessarily used to that environment. This is not a black and white. I don't want people to think if you have a healthy microbiome, you cannot get norovirus or a bacterial infection. That's not true. It's just that you're more resilient, right? So it's just more resilience. So it's not complete protection. So that's one mechanism. Another mechanism is that the microbiome interacts with the immune system. So again, we should have an episode, but people should know that about 70% of all cells that represent our immune system actually spend their days in the intestines. I see. So just on the outside of the intestines, and they're listening to the chemical signals produced by nutrients and the microbiome. And these are super important signals that are telling them, "Am I being attacked by something or is everything okay?
Am I healthy?" So the balance between inflammation and anti-inflammation is established in the gut. What they're also listening for is specific signals that produces food tolerance or food intolerance. And so we're going to obviously talk later about food sensitivities and food allergies, and the gut microbiome plays a very important role in this translation of what is food and what is not food. For now, I just want to put in a teaser that microbiome also produces butyrate and butyrate is a highly useful molecule that is a microbial metabolite, but one particular function that I love is that it signals our immune system to create a memory. And so people probably know that our immune system can create a memory, but it's not like a memory like we, our central nervous system remembers like a movie they watched. It's a memory where there are these cells called T-cells that will attack viruses like the coronavirus or the influenza virus or any other virus.
They will attack them. And then after the virus is removed from the system, those cells die because they're not needed. We don't want to spend energy supporting them unless they get a signal from the gut microbiome via this molecule butyrate. If they sense butyrate in the blood, they're going to actually survive and convert themselves to memory T-cells. And these T-cells are going to circulate in our bloodstream for decades and they're there because the immune system now remembers that pathogen. And when that pathogen comes in next time, we can fight it off day one instead of spending three to five days to build the immunity against it. We have immunity instantly. And that's why vaccines don't have 100% efficiency or efficacy. That's because some percentage of people have some genetic anomalies, but most of them likely simply don't produce butyrate or their microbiomes are not producing butyrate post-vaccine.
And so their immune system reacts to the vaccine, but it doesn't build a memory. And so then you're exposed to future. And in fact, we are going to have an episode on the infant microbiome and how this mechanism specifically protects infants and develops the memory in infants. And this is how that mechanism was actually discovered by studying the kids that were actually vaccinated successfully versus those that were not.
Guru:
Very, very interesting. Oh my God, you've said so many things over there. So I just want to unpack a few things over there. Okay? So I think what you said is that number one, my microbiome is actually creating an environment or a niche in which it can survive well and it can actually use up the resources so that if there's an intruder, that it doesn't let the intruder use any of the resources in the niche. So that's the way it prevents intuitives for coming in, number one. Number two, you said it basically trains my immune system by showing who are friends, meaning these are all normal residents of the microbiome, so don't harm these guys. So just stay friendly. But if there's a different type of organism that comes in, then go attack it. So the immune system learns what patterns to attack and so forth.
But not only that, it also learns how to remember the patterns to attack for the longer term, not just get it now and then forget about it, but remember it. And you said all these things about inflammation and butyrate and all that stuff. So inflammation, of course, is the way in which the body reacts to any kind of assault of any type, triggers of any kind. And butyrate happens to be one of those molecules that is able to help prevent or be anti-inflammatory because it's actually creating many effects in the intestinal environment, one of which is this memory you mentioned, but probably there are other functions as well of these short-chain fatty acids like Bureate, which we'll talk about later. So amazing. That's just a great set of functions, but I want to go into some other aspects of the micro one that I've heard about, but I've not truly figured out and understood integrated in my own knowledge base, which is that I hear that some of our microbiome friends make vitamins and they make certain kinds of metabolites that we would normally not be able to produce through just our human cell metabolism.
So which are those vitamins and what do they do?
Momo:
Yeah. I would like first to back up one step and make sure that people understand when we talk about the terms like metabolites and chemistry and chemical reactions. So let me give an example that most people will understand. So a typical chemical reaction, if you go to chemistry 101 in any college, it'll basically show you have a substrate and then you have an enzyme or a catalyst and it'll be converted into a product. That's what a chemical reaction is. And let's talk about an example if that seems abstract. When you're making beer or when anyone makes beer, that's basically following that basic rule. We have a substrate, which is barley, it's malted barley, but let's just call it barley. And then you feed that barley to a yeast. It's called brewers yeast or sacroi ECA, that yeast produces a few proteins called enzymes because they have a catalytic function.
They have a chemical processing ability. These proteins or enzymes will then take barley through a few chemical reactions where substrate from barley goes to another molecule and then another molecule is taken to another molecule and so on. And we're going to discuss this in the context of pathways later on. Many, many episodes from now, we're going to be talking about pathways. So a pathway, which is a cascade of chemical reactions, converts that barley all the way to ethanol. And ethanol is the final product because the brewer's yeast has no metabolic capability of extracting energy from ethanol. And so it's basically its poop. And so literally think of yeast, even though it's just a few microns in diameter, think of it as consuming malted barley and pooping out ethanol. And that's what making beer is like. And so these are the chemical reactions. These are the metabolites.
And the final metabolite that yeast produces is ethanol.
Guru:
Okay. Got it.
Momo:
All right. So
Guru:
Let's go back to the vitamin question
Momo:
Last. Let's go back to the vitamins. Yes. So it turns out that bacteria produce most vitamins and that naturally they produce vitamins for us over the course of the evolution. And it's interesting, I want to just bring a little bit of a topic here that's very relevant to people like going shopping, for example. So when you read an article and it says eggs are rich in this source of vitamin and like vitamin K2 or vitamin B something, right? You have to be careful about interpreting that because it turns out that chickens are not capable of producing these vitamins. It's really the chicken microbiome that produces the vitamin, the chicken's intestines absorb those vitamins and package them in the egg so that the chick can then live off those vitamins. But what happens in modern farming is the chickens are given antibiotics. A water of chickens are given antibiotics or they're not fed any kind of diet that has fiber.
And these bacteria that produce vitamins also require fiber. So if you buy an egg from a chicken that has never seen a fiber in their life and it's been treated with antibiotics since birth, those eggs may not have many, if any vitamins in them versus if you get a pasture raised organic chicken that has never been treated with antibiotics, now we're talking business. Now that's a chicken that's both exposed to a natural microbiome, which means it very likely has bacteria that produce vitamins and it's eating grass out there in nature, which means that it's providing those bacteria with fiber to produce those vitamins. And now the eggs produced from that chicken are far more nutritional. And so these are the kinds of little nuances that are very important. And when it comes to humans, microbes in our completely wild, natural gut will produce most vitamins.
Now, what amounts are produced exactly and how sufficient that is for our life, that has not been studied to the point where I can make any claims about that. So it's not clear whether you can just feed the bacteria and they'll produce all the vitamins you need, even if you have a fully wild microbiome. But the point is they do supplement at a minimum. And there's some evidence that people whose microbiome produces more vitamin C, they have less oxidative damage and less just in general DNA damage and they live longer. So there are some studies that are starting to reveal these connections.
Guru:
So do you mean to say that the microbiome generates pretty much the entire range of vitamins and some more, some less? What would you say?
Momo:
It's not the entire range. Vitamin A is not produced by microbes that comes from a nutritional sources and vitamin D is not produced by the microbiome as far as I know. So there are some vitamins that are not produced by the microbiome, but I would say majority are.
Guru:
Majority are. Excellent.
Momo:
Yeah, majority are.
Guru:
So Momo, you mentioned GLP before. So what is the process or the function by which GLP works and what is the role of the microbiome in that?
Momo:
Yeah. So this is a very deep topic and I think eventually we should have an episode on just this because it's such a hot topic.
Guru:
Man, we've laid out like 10 episodes already in the first part of this episode.
Momo:
This podcast announcement of many episodes. Okay. So GLP-1 hormone is actually produced continuously by cells inside our intestines. Most of them are being in the colon and the large intestine. And these cells are called L-cells.
Now, they produce it independent of anything, whether our brain thinks a certain way, whether we eat something or not, what our microbiomes are doing, nothing matters. They produce it and store it and they're ready to release it. The key is now that humans do not have the ability to release it on their own. It's the bacteria that orchestrate that process. And so it's the microbes that are stimulating these L-cells to release GLP-1. And there are currently about eight or nine microbial metabolites. Going back to my ethanol story with brewerseas, that would be a metabolite. There are about eight or nine metabolites that are microbially produced that we have identified that actually stimulate the release of GLP-1. And so the story I would like people to take away is that
Healthy people who have a healthy microbiome, meaning fully functional microbiome, who feed that microbiome appropriate foods, they have enough stimulant to produce plenty of GLP. I mean, this has been done for hundreds of thousands of years before we invented GLP-1, right? And before we invented antibiotics and ruined our microbiome, this has been done. Obesity wasn't a problem a couple of centuries ago or even 50 years ago. So if you feed the right microbes, the right nutrients, they will produce these signals. Your body will release GLP-1 every single day, and you don't need to take any supplements. You can just figure that out. And my wife and I luckily have figured that out and it's really working well. And so I'm really excited about that. Now, if you either have lost members of your microbial community who stimulate GLP release or you have them, but you're not feeding them the right foods, then there's not going to be a stimulation and you're going to need to potentially explore pharmaceutical approaches.
Now, for those who still have the ability, we will be able to compute what to eat in order to stimulate GLP-1 production. But for those people who have lost the ability, there are probably some probiotics that can produce these. In fact, I know that there are probiotics that can produce some of these molecules. So it's possible that someone can go on probiotics and prebiotics, colonize them, and then re-stimulate, but it's also possible that some people cannot, and those will need to resort to pharmaceutical approaches. So this is like a new field that's opening up. Biomin is at a great position to understand all the details, to quantify all the parameters and to really deliver the right information to every person.
Guru:
Wow, man. Okay. So that's very cool. Thank you. As you are speaking about all of these functions, I'm thinking about the gut lining that is exposed to all of this activity going on in the microbiome. And so the gut lining is this barrier that is protecting the blood circulation in our body from whatever could be going on. So good and bad on the microbiome side. So I hear a lot about the integrity of the barrier between the intestinal activities and the human body itself. What is the role of the barrier? What are the elements that can harm the barrier? And what happens if that barrier breaks?
Momo:
Yeah. Are you trying to avoid the word leaky gut?
Guru:
Thought you wouldn't mention it, but ...
Momo:
Okay. Yeah, we're talking about the leaky gut,
Guru:
Leaky gut,
Momo:
Which is also called intestinal permeability, gut barrier function, all that stuff. Yeah, super important. This was a taboo topic just a few years ago until now there are mainstream publications and peer reviewed journals showing that leaky gut actually is a root cause of many metabolic and many other diseases. And so we really need to talk about it. We cannot just not talk about it. So I would like people to envision that the barrier between our organism, human side and the microbial side, which is also called the intestinal lumen, is literally one layer of cells, one layer of epithelial human cells. And that's like a few microns thick. That's the barrier. And so humans have basically evolved. That's not enough, obviously. So humans have evolved to produce mucin or mucus layer. And so these are polysaccharides that our cells produce and continuously sort of eject into the lumen of the intestines.
And so they create this sticky mucusy layer that's continuously being produced and shed. And so if anything sticks to it, and pathogens, of course, are going to try to stick to it and penetrate that one layer, right? If anything sticks to it, hopefully before the pathogen can drill through, you can actually shed them and just continuously do that. So that's a huge defense mechanism. And you want to basically separate ourselves from the intestinal lumen, and we want to be actively transporting only the micronutrients and chemical signals from the microbiome that we're interested in and not anything else. So if you ingest some toxins or if the bacteria produce toxins, you don't want them. So you want to be able to pick and choose what you want. So that's sort of the description of the intestinal barrier. Now, what kinds of things contribute to its stability and its destruction?
Again, a whole topic on this for a podcast, so we'll get there, but some high level things are that we have a microorganism called Akermansium ecinophila, and it works not alone, but with some other microorganisms to digest this mucus away. And as it's digesting this mucus, it's actually stimulating the production of more mucus. So that's like a natural mechanism. So in order to produce more mucus, our cells, I guess, have to sense that it's being consumed and that it's thin. And so acumency mucinophila plays a very important role in maintaining that barrier integrity. There are many, many other factors that will either stabilize it, like butyrate stabilizes the intestinal barrier integrity, which butyrate is going to become like a celebrity of all microbial metabolites, and there are many bacterial toxins and there are some metabolites that actually destroy the intestinal barrier. And so for example, we're going to get into this, I'm sure at some point in time when we get to sulfide scores and so on, but in many cases in hemophysiology, there are metabolites that are healthy at certain levels, but if they go too high or too low, they're not healthy.
And so hydrogen sulfide is one of those where at low levels, it's actually healthy. It stimulates intestinal barrier integrity, but if there's too much of it, it can cause leaky gut. So many more topics on that, but for now, the takeaway is that short-chain fatty acids in general and specifically butyrate the most stimulate the intestinal barrier health. And one of the ways that butyrate does that is that this is another example of co-evolution. Our intestinal cells actually harvest energy from uterate. So while the vast majority of our cells in the body, we say we are powered by glucose, right? Our cells in the body run off glucose and fats. These cells in the intestines, they've actually evolved to live off butyrate. And so if they're not fed butyrate by microorganisms, they can become not healthy and not maintain the barrier well.
Guru:
So Mamo, we are talking a lot about metabolites. So I want to understand a little bit about metabolites. So metabolites, essentially from a chemistry perspective, they're small molecules, right? And they have many functions, I'm sure. But are you saying that the microbial metabolites that at least the ones that you've talked to us about so far are generally good or some of them are bad? Tell us more about how these things function.
Momo:
Yeah, that's a super deep question. And we're going to go over some of those right now as examples. And then that's going to be a common thread. I would say over many, many different episodes, we're going to be bringing up the function of different metabolites and they can have any of those that you mentioned. So some of them are generally known to be good, but let me just mention that butyrate at too high levels actually can cause corolorical cancer, which is crazy, right? That it's this metabolic celebrity where it has so many beautifully phenomenally healthy functions, but too much of a good thing is not necessarily good. And uterate- Also,
Guru:
I heard from one of our other scientists that butyrate may have a great positive function in the gut, but not necessarily so in the mouth.
Momo:
There you go. Exactly. So we have good evidence for that and we should bring Eric to explain to us all those details because I'm not an expert in that. So there are examples where some metabolites are very, very useful, very helpful, very beneficial, very healthy, maybe through a very large concentration range or maybe not the entire concentration range. We have some metabolites that are mostly harmful, and obviously bacterial toxins would be mostly harmful, but there are some others that are harmful that are not known to be toxins or that are harmful at certain concentrations. And so we really need to study a lot more, but we have a lot of information already. And we'll go through some of those examples right now. I just wanted to flash this slide, which is basically, what do these metabolites look like? And so here's the structure of the three famous short chain fatty acids.
So I'm showing acetic acid, propeonic acid and butyric acid. So these are acetate, propeonate, or butyrate, depending on the nomenclature can vary. And so these are the structures. And you can see that acidate has two carbon atoms, propionic acid has three, and butaric acid has four. And so there are minor differences, but these have very different metabolic activities in the body. And so metabolites are basically chemicals or compounds, and they deliver chemical signals. And that's really another big takeaway from this podcast and many other future podcasts, which is that our body, for the most part, subconsciously works on chemical signaling. Just because we are conscious and we can communicate with words, that doesn't work for the human physiology. You cannot talk to your immune system, your microbes cannot talk to the immune system. They communicate via chemical signals. And so all of these molecules are chemical signals and those signals are either, "Here, I'm going to support you with energy or I'm going to poison you.
" Or they are, "Hey, do certain things, and those things can be either good for us or bad for us, or they can be neutral and we just poop them out. " So there are all kinds of scenarios, and we're going to dive deep into many, many of these, but this is just sort of a flavor for today because it's so exciting. So let's go back to your question and give some examples and explain those. So I want to go back to the vitamins because I want to just say that vitamin B5 specifically produced in the gut microbiome, the gut microbiome has been shown to stimulate release of GLP-1. So that's one of the mechanisms, but so are the short-chain fatty acids. So all three short-chain fatty acids that I showed you right now have been shown to stimulate GLP-1 release, but especially butyrate. And so that's really important.
We talked about the intestinal barrier health and reducing systemic inflammation. Basically, butyrate tells the immune system, "Hey, everything's cool here. Don't worry about it. Don't be alarmed." All right, let's talk about secondary bile acids. So I think people are familiar with bile and bile acids in general. We as humans produce them in the liver and they're squirted into the small intestine when the food is arriving from the stomach, and they're basically there to do two functions, to perform two functions. One is they're going to solubilize fat molecules so that we can digest them and absorb them. And second, they're keeping microbes out of the small intestine. And see, this is where this co-evolution is kind of interesting to me in that we as humans, well, all mammals have compartmentalized our intestine into two parts. One part is the small intestine where we secrete bile and basically remove the vast majority of microbes from the food.
And so it's not a sterile environment, but the density of microbes in the small intestine is thousands or tens of thousands of times smaller than the large intestine. So we have basically claimed the small intestine and we said, "Okay, we're going to have the first dibs on the food. We're going to process this food. We're going to collect as many calories as we can from this food, and then we're going to push the leftovers into the colon and the colon is a completely different environment. This is where we are going to remove oxygen and allow all these thousand species or microbes to process the rest of the foods and provide chemical signals to tell us what does our world look like, what is the pathogen status, and to help us live a healthy life." So I think that's just an amazing thing. So we're not just a tube.
Our intestines are not just a tube, it's a complementalized tube with very, very different functions. And I want people to understand that what happens in the small intestine is vastly different from the large intestine. And when people say, "Well, gut microbiome tests don't test the small intestines, so that's a limitation." Yes, that is a limitation, but realizing that the number of microbes in the small intestine is very small and that they make a very small contribution to our health is very important and that it's really the colon where the microbes take the main role and that's what we're sampling for gut microbiome. So those are important things.
Guru:
Great. Mobile. So I want to ask another maybe two or three important questions for this episode, okay? And then we'll leave the other questions for future episodes.
Momo:
Sounds good.
Guru:
So one of the important questions I have for you is we talked about these organisms, the eucardiotes and the procardios, which are the microbes themselves. And we talked about the metabolites, right? Talk to us a little bit about how an organism eventually produces metabolize. Does it produce metabolites directly? Does it do something else like express some genes from its genome, and then those express genes turn into proteins that eventually end up generating the metabolite? So what is the process by which-
Momo:
Yeah. Yeah. That happens? Yeah. So almost all biochemistry that happens, almost all chemistry that happens inside in the microbiome is happening inside cells, almost all, not all of it. So microbes do release, do secrete enzymes to do some chemistry outside the cells. So for example, if you have a fiber, you cannot ingest fibers directly into a bacterial cell. There are two large structures, right? So bacteria and fungi will release enzymes that cut up those fibers into individual molecules. So like the malting process of barley is you add enzymes to barley and the enzymes degrade the polysaccharides, meaning tens of thousands of glucose molecules are found in one molecule. These enzymes cut it up into shorter fragments so that they have a few glucose molecules. And so that's called malting process and malted barley has small ones. And now the small molecules, which are either monosaccharides or dye or tricaccharides, those can be now imported into the cell.
And so if we go back to the yeast making beer, yeast is going to sense that there's malted barley in the environment, and it's going to express the genes that are necessary to convert barley into ethanol. And there's going to be something on the order of tens of genes for that. So some of the genes are going to express proteins that are going to integrate themselves on the cell surface, and these are called transporters, and they're going to basically grab these malted barley molecules and pull them into the cell. And this process costs energy, but of course you're going to benefit far more than the energy you expect to import them. Once these monodye and triglycarides are inside the cell, now we have basically a glycolytic cycle, very similar to any other organism where it's converting glucose in this case to ethanol and it's harvesting energy.
So for each chemical step where glucose goes to glucose phosphate and then it goes into pyruvate and so on, each step and people can look up this online, it would be wild to expect someone to remember every chemical pathway and every enzyme name and every metabolite name. That's just wild how complex metabolism is. But the concept is that yes, the yeast will express a set of enzymes or in proteins and they will import the substrate, they will process it via several catalytic steps and then produce ethanol, which is then actively expunged or pooped out of the cell. And so yeah, that's how it works.
Guru:
Wow, that's amazing. And so I want to bring up another very important question in my mind is that, is it true that a micro is either good or bad, or is it that the same microbe can be good in some circumstances, bad in certain other circumstances, or it can do all of the above in some combination which is not fully understood?
Momo:
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome topic, huge topic. Let's summarize it. So let's separate microbes into two groups. One is bad microbes, and we call them pathogens, and pathogens are necessarily bad. If you have infection by vibrio cholera, you're probably going to get cholera, not good. So if you have norovirus infection, it's a pathogen. Probably neurovirus is not going to live peacefully with us. So there are hundreds of pathogens, but really hundreds, maybe depending on how you structure them, maybe a thousand. Out of the billions of different kinds of microorganisms, only a thousand are let's say pathogenic.
Guru:
That was going to be my question. A thousand out of a billion, right?
Momo:
Yeah. It's crazy. All others, all others are going to be not pathogenic and for the most part, I would say that they're going to be, for the most part, beneficial to us for the most part, but
Really there are many of them that can also turn to where they're unhealthy, but they're not pathogenic. Meaning, let's go through some examples here because this is really important. Okay. So let's talk about this. There are microbes in the gut that can be very beneficial to us and produce any number of these beneficial chemical signals or metabolites that are telling our body to be physiologically healthy. But the same microbes, if we're consuming, let's say trimethylamine types of foods like choline, carnitine, trimethylglycine, things like that. So trimethylated amines, the same microbes, if they're deprived of other nutritional sources, and that's really a key. If they're deprived of other nutritional sources like fiber, they will process these foods and they will make a compound called trimethylamine, which will then translocate into the bloodstream, go to the liver, and our liver is going to convert it to tramethylamine oxide, TMAO.
And TMAO is one of these bad flares. It causes atherosclerosis. And so that is not a bad microbe. It's not a bad bug. It's normally very healthy. It's just we fed it the wrong food and it's producing a chemical that causes us a harm. And it's not harm like an infectious disease. It's not going to kill us overnight. Cardiovascular disease doesn't set in overnight, but heart attack is the number one cause of death in the world. And so that is a bad effect. And there are many such chemicals that are produced by the microbiome, but they don't have to be. And so this particular specific case, TMAO, is kind of complex because a small amount of TMA produced by bacteria is actually healthy for us. We have co-evolved to require it for our health.
Guru:
Ah, I did not know that.
Momo:
And we'll dive deeper into this, of course, when there's too much TMA produced, then it causes heart disease. I mean, the reason that I think we've co-evolved to have any production of TMA is because it was beneficial and anything over the course of evolution that can make us live to 50, 60 years old was sufficient. If it kills us at 60 from a heart attack evolutionarily, that's not a problem because basically your reproductive age is over, so it doesn't matter if you die or not. So these long-term consequences of too much TMA were not penalized evolutionarily, but the benefits were rewarded. And so yeah, so that's the case. And then we've now learned that you can actually distract maybe basically these microorganisms, which have thousands of genes. They can do many different metabolic functions and they can feed on many different food sources. And so if they have a choice of specific food choices that we can feed them via fiber, they will prefer those and they will not worry about processing choline, let's say, into TMA.
And so you can distract them with fiber, specific fiber for those microorganisms, and then they will produce less of TMA, which means that they're going to actually be beneficial for you. If you avoid those fibers, then they're going to consume foods with choline like phocetyl,choline, choline, carnitine, and so on. Now they're going to be starving because you're not giving them fiber and all of a sudden they're going to be consuming those foods, producing energy from them. But one output of that is TMA, which is bad for us. So you see how complex it is and the complexity increases because many of these microbes that are producing TMA, they're not actually feeding on fiber directly. They're feeding on the fiber byproducts of other microbes. So you have to have the right other microbes present that are consuming the right fiber, producing metabolites, then then feed the TMA producing microbes.
So it gets very complicated very quickly.
Guru:
It's a many step chain over here that's happening across many different organisms, many different chemical reactions and so forth. Yeah, I can see that it's getting pretty complicated. So I want to just drop down to another super relevant question here is that, can the same micro be both good and bad?
Momo:
Yes. Yes, it can. So there are many, many examples of that. And it also depends on how we define a microbe. And so let's talk a little bit about that, but again, we will have a whole episode on genes and genomes, but let's talk about a microbe called E. Coli. E. Coli is a species that has thousands of strains. And some people like me would argue that those really should be different species. And the reason is because we all know that in the context of food safety, that there are E. Coli that if you consume, it will kill you, right? So the pathogenic E. Coli.
And then we have E. Colis that are not necessarily good for us that E. Coli is a very common resident to the gut microbiome. And some of them will produce genotoxic compounds. These are toxins that go after our genome. So E. Coli strains that encode the gene for a specific toxin, it's genotoxic, and it can cause genome instability and cause colorectal cancer. E. Coli can also produce endotoxins. These are called lipopolysaccharides that can stimulate chronic systemic inflammation, but there's a but. E. Coli can also, the same ... So let's isolate one strain of E. Coli, just one strain, and that strain encodes 3000 genes, and that strain can produce genotoxins that are going to potentially cause colorectal cancer. They can produce lipopolysaccharide as an endotoxin to increase inflammation. They can produce INDOL and INDOL is a highly beneficial compound. It's actually, to my knowledge, the only compound that's microbially produced that stimulates neural growth in the central nervous system.
I mean, people tell you that as you age, your central nervous system cannot regenerate itself, and so you're just decaying. That turns out not to be true. And there's a term called neuroplasticity and neuroregeneration, and INDOL is a metabolite produced by E. Coli and other microorganisms that stimulates neuroregeneration. How cool is that? And then it turns out that E. Coli is a great producer of vitamin K2 and many B vitamins, and E. Coli produces acetate, which we discussed is very beneficial. Wow. So now you have the same little sphere, micron in size
That has the capability of producing two really bad things and three really good things. And by testing with, let's say, other tests that are only doing DNA testing, they can only say, "You have E. Coli." We have zero additional information, whereas Viome's RNA test can quantify which genes are actually active and what metabolic activities that E. Coli is performing in your gut. And we can then tune it with nutrition because gene expression is tunable and we can shift the gene expression from negative If the positive or from harmful to beneficial. And that's really the core of the platform, as you know.
Guru:
Makes so much sense. It's not about which organism it is, it's about what it actually is doing. And you can modulate what it actually does depending on what you eat, what you feed it, and so on. That's the takeaway. Exactly. So Momo, I asked you in the beginning, is there a healthy microbiome?
Momo:
So there is a healthy microbiome. That's a perfect topic, and that's going back to what they're producing and not who they are. So the healthy microbiome, everyone else is trying to define unsuccessfully what a healthy microbiome is in terms of composition. It turns out that the same composition can be harmful to you and healthy to you. So how can you define a healthy composition if one day it's harming you, the next day it's helping you. Well, it's not a day apart, but like months apart. But we are defining a completely quantum leap what a healthy microbiome is. And that is, what is the healthy metabolic output of a microbiome? And the composition matters less because there are essentially infinite number of compositional combinations that can still produce a healthy output. And there are infinite number of compositional combinations that can produce a harmful output. So it's not the composition, it's the function.
Maybe we should have that as a logo for our-
Guru:
It's not the composition. It's the function. We will say that over and over again. Wow. That's a very powerful statement. And I think it's the foundation of the next generation of health is how I'd put it. So I have one burning question left, which is, what do these microbes eat?
Momo:
Okay. So they will eat the same food that we eat. So just like we eat carbs and fats and proteins, they will eat those as well. And so whatever is leftover that's not absorbed from the small intestine and goes into the large intestine, they will very happily consume that. I
See.
And if you consume a lot of sugar and you cannot absorb it all and it goes into the colon, they will love it. But they will also consume foods that we are incapable of consuming. And a few examples would be polyphenols. So a bunch of antioxidants we are not capable of consuming, but they can derive energy from them. And then I think the most famous are the fibers. So the fibers or prebiotics are those molecules that we are incapable of consuming, but the microbes obviously do so. They're waiting in the colon for you to feed them fiber. So what are you doing? Go out and get a meal together that feeds both you and your microbiome. These are your best friends. So don't deprive them by eating highly processed wheat and just meat and everything deprived of fiber. They're waiting for you. So that's what- Fiber.
Fiber. Fiber on prebiotics, right? And one of the most ... I'm sorry?
Guru:
Nice salad. Yes.
Momo:
You can have a nice salad. You can have a bunch of veggies. You can have a bunch of fruits. You can have a bunch of whole grains. They all contain different kinds of fiber that is going to feed different members of your microbes. And yeah. And I want to point out one specific fiber that is extraordinarily useful and that is the human milk oligosaccharides. And as I said before, we are going to have an episode on infant microbiome and how it's important. To me, I'm going to make a very bold statement that the single most important event after birth in your entire life is the acquisition of a healthy microbiome, the single most important event. It doesn't matter where you're born, who you're born from, what you eat, what you do, what your genes are. No, it doesn't matter, but it's not as important as the microbiome you acquire at birth or soon after birth.
We will talk about the details of that. And the reason that that's important is many, but I want to involve here. The human milk oligosaccharides are another example of this co-evolution. Incredibly, women produce calories and put them in milk to feed the microbiome specifically. These are calories that the baby cannot consume, cannot utilize. Literally human milk and any mammalian milk is directly feeding specific beneficial microbes that are doing all those beneficial functions we discussed earlier. Wow. How crazy is that in terms of co-evolution and symbiosis?
Guru:
That is amazing. That is amazing. Unbelievable, actually. But going back to all those foods we talked about, whether it's vegetables, fruits, all those nice salads, grains, everything else, what's cooking in your life, in your recent days, Momo?
Momo:
Oh yeah. I even have a picture of that. So let's go over that. So what's cooking? I mean, we're experimenting in the kitchen almost every day on the weekends very intensely. And this was an interesting thing because we do this, I wouldn't say quite often, but we do it regularly. A few times a year, we will watch some kind of a travel or a cooking show and they'll be on an isolated remote Greek island and they'll say things like, "This meal is only cooked in this Greek island by this 90-year-old grandma and nobody else is doing it. " Well, guess what? We can make it into our kitchen in Seattle. That's crazy. And so this particular episode, it was Stanley Tucci and he was in Body at Southeast Italy coast and they have a local cuisine as every part of Italy does. And they claim, which I think is true, that they have this local dish that nowhere else you can be found in Italy.
And it's basically onion pasta. So they grow these sweet purple onions in that part of the country and they make sweet purple onion, vegetable broth, pasta sauce, and they lay it on top of pasta. That's it, literally. And so we watched the show, we did some research, we came up with the recipe. It's fairly simple, and we made it at home. So I'm showing here, I'm not sure if you can see the cursor,
But
... Oh, you can. And I'll explain it for both the video audience and the audio only audience. But basically, you basically cook onions in vegetable broth. So you first have to cook vegetables, create two liters of vegetable broth from carrots and celery and onions and so on and just I think one spice. And then you're going to be pouring that sauce over the onions and caramelizing them for quite a long time, like an hour. And that's the finished sauce. These are just onions basically by mass, purple sweet onions. And then you'll pour that over your favorite pasta. Now, we are very nutritious conscious and we understand that this is a whole wheat pasta from Italy, by the way. So this provides us with a lot of nutrients, but it lacks protein. So there is basically very little protein, just some coming from the pasta, but I'm not going to overload carb load just to get enough protein.
So on the side, we actually did a little Argentinian recipe where we just grilled some salmon and made a simple chimichuiti sauce, just olive oil and herbs. And then we made some zucchini to add more variety. We made some zucchini fritters, which are basically zucchini and onions and garlic and some spices and eggs. Zucchini fritters are one of our faves, so that goes on the side. And then I tried to rescue all the vegetables. I felt bad about throwing away the vegetables from the vegetable broth. And I added some of my soy cream that I make, and I tried to make one of my favorite childhood dishes of carrots and cream. But unfortunately, once you cook vegetables and take away their broth, you've taken away their flavor, basically completely. So this was a done, but at least I tried it and it didn't work. But the rest of the meal was absolutely fabulous.
The flavor of this is very unique, very fabulous. And these are the kinds of things that people can do with kids and can experiment, and it's wonderful.
Guru:
Man, you're making my mouth water. And it's almost dinner time over here. So I will probably make something interesting for dinner very shortly. But let me just get us towards the end of this episode, okay? I think Momo, you have gone through so many different concepts. You've also mentioned throughout the show about future episodes we're going to have on various topics. One of those future episodes, in fact, it may end up being the very next episode is going to be focused on glycemic response or your blood sugar response, which is a super fundamental aspect of your health and your biology. So we're going to get into that in specifically a study that we did that showed us the role of the microbiome in glycemic response, which is a very interesting insight. So we're going to talk about that. And Momo, what else are we going to have in future episodes?
Momo:
I'm excited that we are going to have one episode where we go over the sample analysis process, both the wet lab and the dry lab. So we are basically going to go through Viome owns a clinical grade metatranscriptomic laboratory, both wet lab and dry lab, which is super unique. There is no other entity in the world that has that, a direct to consumer metatranscriptomic analysis of stool blood and saliva. And so I'm going to actually go to the lab and video different portions and explain to the audience the journey of sample two generating the data. And then of course, you will start where the data uploaded from the lab into the cloud and you will explain all the downstream steps.
Guru:
I will explain all those downstream stuff. And I will also show some really interesting data coming out of the microbe analysis I'd show what kinds of different organisms we see, what kinds of different functions we see, what kinds of different blood transcriptomic, human gene function as well, not just microbiome function. We show all of those things through our analysis. So metatranscriptomics, again, remember that meta means that it's all the different organisms that participate in the transcription process, which is going from genes or DNA to our transcript, which are RNA. So we look at all of the transcripts, all of the RNA molecules, and then we can process that huge, huge amount of data and we have to make sense out of it, which is a fascinating algorithmic problem and AI problem, which we'll also talk about in one of our episodes. And then specifically, we are going to talk about a couple of papers that we published recently.
One of them is about a very large dataset that we have analyzed for things like stability, things like variations. We've also looked at how the oral and the gut microbiome relate to various different functions and various different diseases. So we talked about a bunch of functions on this episode and some of those functions can actually help you get healthier and lack of those functions can get you sick. So those kinds of things we look at in terms of our correlations and analytical frameworks we've set up for looking at the function of the microbiome and the relationship to health. And so we'll go into all of those things and I think we want to remind everybody about our Bio monthly challenge.
Momo:
One more reminder, just in case, free FBI kit, free full body intelligence kit from Biome.
Guru:
There you go. All you have to do is get some food for cheap, make a great nutritious meal, take a picture, post it as a comment, and don't forget to subscribe right down there, come back in the next episode, and you might be the winner of that free full body intelligence kit from Viome.
Momo:
Great. Thank you, Guru. That's it for today's episode. I'm Momo.
Guru:
I'm Guru. We're two PhDs on a pod. All right, Momo. Bye. Bye.
