What is Viome and is it worth it?
If you are reading this blog you've most likely heard of Viome before and you're thinking about buying it. Maybe you are looking to see if it's the right decision for you and want to know what other’s experiences with it has been to see if it's really worth the money. Below is a non-affiliated opinion piece based on my personal experience with Viome as a company, their test kit, and experience receiving my results.
I heard about Viome from someone that I worked with at Equinox. I had been eyeing the testing kit for about 6 months before Colin (my fiance) ended up purchasing it for me as a Christmas gift in 2020. He knows that science is the way to my heart.
What is Viome?
Viome’s mission as a company is to help reduce chronic illness by decoding your biology. They use the latest and best science tools, researchers, and engineers to translate your body’s information on a cellular level into personalized nutritional recommendations that help address the root cause of inflammation, improve your energy, and optimize your health journey using a Health Intelligence Test.
What is the Health Intelligence test?
The Health Intelligence test is a combination of Viome’s Gut Intelligence Test and Human Gene Expression Test. For their gut test, they provide you with a testing kit to analyze a stool sample to provide you information on your microbiome. For their Human Gene Expression Test they send you a kit to analyze a blood sample and provide you information on your mitochondrial health.
Using their kit you send a sample to the Viome lab. They analyze the sample using AI and various other methods to provide you with information about the health of the microbiome in your gut, the productivity of the metabolic pathways in your body and ultimately what foods you should or shouldn't be eating to optimize the health and pathways of your gut.
Why are we doing all this in the first place?
Well the “explain it to me like I’m 5” explanation is as follows. A key part of living a healthy life and having a healthy body starts in our gut. Within our gut, there's something called a gut lining which helps protect the rest of our body from infection or disease. If our gut lining is compromised it makes it easier for diseases or viruses to impact and hurt our body when we take them in through our food. So by having a healthy gut it helps us better fight off infections and helps our immune system work more efficiently.
Another way that our gut is connected to our overall health is through the Vagus nerve. This nerve is like a highway that goes directly from the gut to the brain. The nervous system is responsible for sending information by neurotransmitters. If the nervous system is the highway, neurotransmitters are the cars on the road of the highway. Some of these cars include hormones like dopamine and serotonin that help regulate our mood and different functions in the body.
A majority of serotonin is housed in the gut which plays a massive role in our sleep. So if the gut lining is inflamed or compromised that could potentially negatively influence your serotonin, which could influence your sleep. Poor sleep has a wide array of impacts including compromising your ability to recover from workouts.
Why I decided to try out Viome
The main reason I decided to get the Health Intelligence test was to better understand where my gut health is and create a baseline for what I could be doing to better improve my health. *Disclaimer, I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and before you make any type of lifestyle changes, please speak with your primary care physician*
What does the test entail?
Now that we know the importance of testing our gut bacteria and why we need to optimize it for better health, what does the test actually look like? The gut intelligence test is pretty easy and simple to follow... as long as you read the instructions. Colin, my fiance, ordered the kit from their website and the kit came a couple days earlier than what they had estimated during the holiday season. Within the kit there's different instructions and steps to follow for each test and also direct you to video links for those of us that are visual learners. The instructions seem like it's a pretty simple process but I did have some hurdles along the way.
I found the video for the gut intelligence test to be slightly misleading since the cartoon instructions didn’t correlate exactly with the written instructions. The Human Genome Expression test was also a little complicated for me to complete on my own. The genome expression test is a blood sample that needs to be taken fasted. The kit supplies you with a one time prick device similar to how diabetics test their insulin level. They advise that beforehand you drink a glass of water, do a few jumping jacks and wash your hands under warm water. The first time I completed the kit I did all of the above mentioned tips and still struggled with completing the test. It did happen to be 5a on a cold January winter morning. My blood flow was so slow I could barely get enough to fill the collection tubes they sent in the kit. Ultimately, after I sent in my test Viome sent me a message that there wasn’t sufficient sample to run their tests.
The second time I took the Human Genome Expression test I made sure to hydrate sufficiently the day before and also choose a day that I wouldn’t have to wake up as early. On this occurrence I had difficulty with the pipettes Viome sends with the kit. Ultimately, I decided that the second kit was defective and requested a 3rd kit. On the third try I recruited the help of my fiance and put him on pipette collecting duty as I used my non-pricked hand to steady my sample hand. To be honest it was a little annoying of a process. I am not totally convinced that the HGE test is easy enough to do on your own plus if blood makes you squeamish it definitely would be difficult to do this test solo since you have to handle your own blood.
Timeframe for your results
My fiance got me the kit as a Christmas gift so my timeline might look a little different because of 1. Their holiday sale increased kits sold 2. COVID delays. It took about a week or so to receive the kit in the mail, it actually got delivered earlier than anticipated and I ruined my own Christmas gift. It comes in a box that clearly says viome on it and I am always the one that checks the mail. After I sent my third test kit back, it took about 6 weeks for me to get my results in the app. If your sample is rejected it does NOT say it on the main page of the app. I had already been waiting about a month and was digging around their app and found it in a non-intuitive section. I’m not sure at what point of the testing my sample got rejected so I may or may not have found this sooner if it was on the main page. Overall, between when I took my initial test to when I got my results from my 2nd retest it took about 12 weeks. Again, I want to highlight that I think this is an abnormal timeline due to the fact that I did have to do 3 tests to get my initial results.
When you receive your kit the first thing you'll do is go to viome.com to register the kit. There's a homepage that will look something similar to this where you will put the custom code that comes with your kit. This will also be where you will answer a short questionnaire and see your results.
Food Results
So the first thing we'll take a look at here is my food to avoid and minimize. It's not a terribly long list, but I personally did find this pretty helpful, because there were a couple of these foods that I was eating on a daily or weekly basis, and I never would have thought to stop eating them had I not taken this test. For instance I was eating spinach, nearly every single day, sometimes even twice a day. Broccoli, cabbage, and yogurt I was eating nearly every single weekday and they showed up on my avoid list.
One of the things I found most interesting is when you click on the listed Avoid food it'll expand on why they recommend you don't eat it. So for Broccoli it says “Broccoli contains glucosinolates which has been shown to impair the absorption or utilization of essential nutrients if it is not degraded by specific microbes.” I don’t have the microbiome to digest broccoli effectively so that's why it made it to my avoid list. This is probably my favorite part of this entire experience.
It also tells you the foods that are your superfoods according to your biochemistry. I was excited to see how long my superfood list was and that it had a mix of fruits, vegetables, and protein. There was a sprinkle of nuts and seeds in there as well. Additionally, it breaks down how many servings of each food group it recommends for you and how much a serving size is for every food in your Superfood, Enjoy, and Minimize list. One of the things I was glad to have clarified is that you can have foods on your minimize list… in moderation. However, I am trying to avoid foods on the minimize list just because I found tracking the servings to be a little much.
For example looking at the protein food group the following are on my minimize list: Almonds, eggs, pork, shrimp and tuna. Before I took the viome test I ate eggs as a staple for breakfast, drank almond milk, would have almonds as a snack, and would have the other mentioned foods as a lunch or dinner option. To follow the recommendations of the Viome test I can only have 1 of the minimum foods in a day. I didn’t want to have to think “what did I have for breakfast” or “if I have almonds as a snack it means I cant have shrimp when I go out to dinner”. Instead, if Colin and I go out for dinner THAT’s when I’ll take into consideration if I want to eat something off of my minimize list. Plus, for me and my relationship with food it’s more fun to think about what I CAN eat.
Pathway Results
The Gut Intelligence also gives a comprehensive breakdown of the various metabolic pathways your body uses to digest food. Here is where they break down the health of your gut and categorize it as either being good, average or not optimal. Some of the categories that they offer information on are: inflammatory activity, metabolic fitness, digestive efficiency, gut lining health, protein fermentation. If you're interested in taking a deeper dive into what each of these mean, you just click on it and it further breaks down the production pathways.
Human Genome Expression Results
The HGE gives you scores for your cellular health, mitochondrial health, immune system and biological age. In comparison to the GI tests the results are underwhelming. There is a general explanation as to what the score is testing and how they calculated the score. In addition, it doesn’t really give you any information on how to improve the scores other than buying their supplements. I’ll show an example below:
My cellular health score was in the red and seems to have been greatly affected by my Immune System Activation. This makes sense since I already know my autoimmune system is compromised. When I open up the tab there is a brief description of what each score means as well as what supplements I can take to improve my score.
Customer Service
Another thing I wanted to cover here was the customer service experience with this company. Overall I'd give it a 10 out of 10. As I mentioned at the beginning I had a couple issues with my test. It was very easy to communicate with the customer service reps on the phone and via email. What I think was the best part of their customer service was that they sent me 2 re-test kits at no cost, not even shipping and handling, when I was struggling to collect my samples.
Is Viome Worth it?
Alright, so after covering all that, let's answer the question that you really want to know is VIOME worth it. I think it is absolutely worth it if you are serious about committing to the changes the test recommends. Within a month of following the nutrition recommendations I noticed that I had clearer and smoother skin, my stomach wasn’t as irritated and bloated, and I was feeling satiated eating less. Being someone with a history of stomach issues since college I think it can be really easy to take our health and wellness for granted or even think of something as being normal when it isn’t.
As far as the test price goes ultimately I do think it is worth it. If you are on the fence about it, maybe instead of treating yourself to a new outfit or going out one evening with friends, set that money aside as an investment in your health. The food we put in our body helps to create energy and shape the results we are working for in the gym/studio. I think my biggest takeaway was before this test I was eating food that I thought was healthy, and it was, just not for the biochemistry of my body. With the information this test provided me I have been able to rework my nutrition and I am really excited to see how implementing this will affect my running and strength training. If you are serious about your health it means being serious about all the facets that are included in health, not just working out. It also includes mindfulness, sleep, and nutrition.
Resources:
Berardi, John. The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition: Certification Manual. Precision Nutrition, Inc., 2017.
Silverthorn, Dee Unglaub, and Bruce R. Johnson. Human Physiology: An Integrated Approach. Pearson Education, 2012.
Viome.com, www.viome.com/.
