You, Decoded: A Complete Guide to Viome’s Test Scores
From Gut Intelligence™ and Oral Health Intelligence™ to Full Body Intelligence™ Test - Upgrade Your Health IQ
Here at Viome, we comprehensively analyze your samples by combining expert systems biology, nutritional research, and an AI approach that allows us to systematically analyze the data and integrate it into personalized dietary and supplement recommendations. At our core, Viome’s mission is to view each human as a unique and complex system. This has required substantial efforts to use and expand on the scientific research of chronic diseases and combine it with innovative computer systems technology.
Systems biology is an approach in biomedical research to understanding the larger picture—be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell—by putting its pieces together. It's in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking the pieces apart. The biology of a human body is a dynamic interplay between complex cellular, molecular, organ, and tissue systems, all of which can be impacted by the different nutrients and toxins that can come either from our diet or produced by the trillions of microbes that thrive inside us - from our oral cavity to the gut.Our approach enables us to determine precise personalization of food or supplements for every person and allows us to quantify, manipulate, and track cellular and microbial pathways, revealing how molecules are made or used, which functions in the body can get stimulated or suppressed, and how it all can be manipulated by following recommendations designed for you.
Viome’s RNA sequencing technology, licensed from Los Alamos National Lab, measures gene expression, which is actively transcribed “messages” in all living organisms. Like DNA, RNA (ribonucleic acid) is used to express genetic information, but incorporates ‘actively involved’ genes. Their expression tells us what is happening inside and not just who is present. While DNA does not change, RNA is dynamic and fluctuates as we change our diets or lifestyles or even as we transition between different states of health.
Measuring RNA offers a way to tell what is actively happening inside and the different levels of activities of various molecular pathways that make up health-related functions. Viome has scaled direct-to-consumer services to test and quantify all microbial and human RNA. Then, individual assessments are used to develop integrative health metrics that provide each person with their own analyses, including over 30 different health scores. Each score describes a cellular pathway and ranks the health of each level. Most importantly, we create evidence-based, personalized food and supplement recommendations assisted by a team of world-renowned translational scientists and our proprietary AI technology to promote a healthier state with your precise needs. Our goal is to make getting the nutrients you need easy, affordable, and without the “extra” things you don’t need often found in off-the-shelf supplements and biotics.
How Our ‘Intelligence’ Scores Are Categorized
Our tests feature an integrative view of human health starting from human and gut microbiome perspectives to our blood and oral microbiome at multiple levels of resolution. Each test includes specific pathways responsible for an individual’s molecular underpinnings of inflammation or detoxification pathways to broader health areas.
In your scores, you’ll find a variety of terms - such as Integrative Health Scores, Functional Scores, and Pathway Scores. Each one defines different levels of complexity when we review your health.
To develop our scores we look at many expressed genes that have known roles in health. Your unique activity levels in these pathways help our understanding of your overall biology and give us the ability to address different areas of health in your body with molecular-level precision.
Our Integrative Health Scores are general categories that refer to specific areas of health, such as your ‘Gut Health’ score, and others. From there we break down each field of Integrative Health into Functional Scores. These scores describe both beneficial and harmful biological functions. The sub-categories of Functional Scores make up your various Pathway Scores that assess metabolic and signaling pathways activated by human cells and microorganisms. When you see the phrase, “Pathway Activity,” it’s referring to what is actively happening in your cells or what your microbes are actively doing in your gut, that is, how molecules (enzymes or metabolites) are being processed to form others.
Combined, these scores represent an overall assessment of key health areas that impact how you feel, look, and age. And together, they determine your food and supplement recommendations.
Our first product features the most comprehensive gut microbiome test on the market: our Gut Intelligence Test. This test analyzes your stool sample to determine scores associated with your overall gut health.
Gut Health
Next in line, our Full Body Intelligence Test incorporates key insights from our blood to formulate the next set of Integrative Health Scores:
Cellular & Energy Efficiency
Immune System Health
Biological Age
Inflammation Response
Our Full Body Intelligence Test includes a new evolution of Integrative Health Scores derived from a saliva sample that now incorporates the use of molecular and microbial signatures from bacteria within the oral microbiome. These new scores feature insight into new areas, including:
Oral Health
Heart & Metabolic Health
Brain & Cognitive Health
We then translate these cellular and molecular signals using advanced Artificial Intelligence and Translational Science knowledge to provide individuals with precise health scores and nutrition recommendations (superfoods, foods to avoid, supplements) that their bodies uniquely need.
You may be surprised by some of the new things you learn:
Does your body say you are younger or older than the age on your birth certificate?
Is your body producing enough ‘happy’ hormones?
How is your gut microbiome impacting your glycemic response?
Are you eating more protein than your body can handle?
Are your cells receiving enough energy to function efficiently in order to prevent accelerated aging?
Are you getting enough Vitamin D?
Are your cells performing their functions efficiently or undergoing stress due to oxidative stress, inflammation, or environmental toxins?
Over time, your recommended food and supplement scores may change depending on how your body functions and feels. With regular testing, our technology allows us to adjust your recommendations and fine-tune them dynamically in a way that is unique to your biology. If you’re subscribed to Viome Precision Supplements™, Probiotics + Prebiotics, Oral Lozenges, or VRx My·Biotics™ Toothpaste and Gel, we’ll update your formula with your new ingredients as needed.
The Health Score Breakdown
With each Intelligence Test, you’ll receive an inclusive list of scores that can illuminate the state of your health. Each score is an assessment that depicts a snapshot of your health at the time of your test. Please remember that these scores can change with time, based on your lifestyle and nutritional routine. However, testing at regular intervals can help show you the trends of your body and how it responds to changes in your diet.
Don’t Forget: Your Recommendations Are Specific to You!
Every person receives unique scores, food, and supplement recommendations based on their own individual health profile. Your results depict the individual state of your system - therefore your personalized food and supplement recommendations will never be generalized and may vary greatly from your neighbor.
Gut Health
(Available in Viome’s Gut Intelligence Test and Full Body Intelligence Tests)
Are your microbes allowing you to get those polyphenol antioxidant benefits? Can your microbes digest the oxalates in that spinach salad? Are you eating more protein than your gut can handle right now?
These are only a few of the things you may learn from our first score, Gut Health, derived from Viome’s flagship gut microbiome analysis, which has been available for several years and is used now by over 400,000 customers. Your gut microbiome is linked to your weight, energy, stress, sleep, and immunity among many health benefits. You are probably already familiar with the notion that you can promote gut health by increasing microbial richness and diversity. However, it’s not all about the number and variety of organisms you have, but also about the diversity and balance of functions they perform. The more active microbial types you have and the more beneficial functions are taking place, the more adaptability and resilience you will have for your microbiome, your gut, and your health.
Viome combines more than 20 scores and pathways including Inflammatory Activity, Digestive Efficiency, Metabolic Fitness, Gut Lining Health, Gut Active Microbial Diversity, and more in order to make up your high-level gut health score. Based on biochemical pathways contributing to each of the functions we focus on, some people may need to boost certain nutrient levels (like butyrate) while others may need to reduce specific gases or toxin production (such as ammonia, LPS, or sulfide).
These scores can tell us a lot about how your gut microbiome is operating - including which foods might pose a risk to the overall health of you or your gut colony. Although many foods are very healthy, they can contain hard-to-digest compounds that require the help of your gut microbiome. Without the right level of balance or microbial richness in your gut, these superfoods might not be the best choice for you. For example, spinach - with all its leafy green glory - is rich in oxalates. If your gut ecosystem doesn’t support plenty of oxalate-digesting microbes, that oxalate may bind with calcium in your diet and increase your risk of kidney stones. But by assessing who is inside you and what they are doing, we can provide precision recommendations that help diversify and stabilize your gut microbiome.
If this score is suboptimal in your results, it can be improved through target dietary and supplement recommendations. And at Viome, we get specific - down to particular prebiotics, probiotics, vitamins, and nutrients through food or precision supplements. We’ve got just the formula for you!
The following scores are available with our Full Body Intelligence Test:
The scores below include thousands of custom-built pathway components manually curated from comprehensive peer-reviewed literature and translational science expert logic and made scalable by Viome’s powerful AI platform.
Cellular & Energy Efficiency
When cells lack the nutrition they need and can't function optimally by producing energy efficiently over time, your metabolism slows, the body ages faster, and illness may occur. Your Cellular & Energy Efficiency score offers a complete picture of what is happening in the human body on the cellular level and takes into account the aging of your cells, cellular stress, cellular inflammation, along with the health of your mitochondria. If your Cellular & Energy Efficiency score is not optimal or low, this can mean that your cellular functions are not performing efficiently, your energy production is low, or your cells are undergoing stress due to oxidative stress, inflammation, or environmental toxins. To improve this score, we may recommend antioxidants or anti-inflammatory food and supplements, sufficient hydration, polyphenols to neutralize free radicals, and supplements that act as cofactors for these pathways.
Immune System Health
A healthy immune system is essential for fighting off outside invaders like viruses, bacteria, and fungi, neutralizing environmental toxins, and preventing changes within cells that lead to disease. Your Immune System Health score assesses your immune response based on the inflammatory activities throughout your body as well as inside of your gut. This score considers over 14 functional pathway scores, including those related to your body’s ability to clear toxins from the gut, manage oxidative stress, and mitigate pro-inflammatory pathways. The Immune System Health score assesses immune system activity related to immune surveillance (innate immunity,) immune communication (cytokine and interleukin signaling,) and immune response to microbial threats (adaptive immunity) or injury (wound healing).
Biological Age
It’s very possible that your biological age may be different than your chronological age. Viome’s AI has analyzed data from over 400,000 customers to match molecular patterns from people of different ages in order to determine your Biological Age score.
Learn more about Biological Age with Guru Banavar, Viome’s Founding Chief Technology Officer:
Inflammation Response
With the Full Body Intelligence Test, Viome offers the most advanced, holistic microbiome test on the market. We look at the beginning of the digestive system, or the top of the tube (oral microbiome), down to the end - the bottom of the tube (gut microbiome) - and everything in between (your human cells and the inner “highway” vascular system that connects your organs). This unique biochemical individuality inside each of us can seem mysterious and overwhelming all at once, but Viome is taking on that challenge to bring a better understanding of your biology to you in a simple, actionable plan. Suppressing harmful activities and promoting positive ones in the oral microbiome can have positive outcomes in the gut and beyond. A healthy gut microbiome will also benefit your human cells and other organs in your body. This translates to optimal health by addressing key problem areas to help you age better, feel better, and look better.
Oral Health
(Available with Viome’s Full Body Intelligence Test and Oral Health Intelligence Test)
Your digestive system begins with your mouth and is often your first line of defense against pathogens. Your mouth is home to over 6 billion bacteria and is referred to as the ‘oral’ microbiome. This oral microbiome is distinct from the gut microbiome, but its influence is just as great. Oral health extends beyond the mouth and is intricately connected to your cardiovascular, immune, bone, and brain health. Your Oral Health Score integrates six functional pathway scores that assess your oral microbiome, providing you with a scorecard of key components of your oral health.
Heart & Metabolic Health
The heart is central to our health, pumping vital oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. While many people simply think of managing their cholesterol to improve their cardiovascular health, in reality, there are many factors at play including oxidative stress, endothelial function, kidney function, and vitamin and mineral status. Your Heart & Metabolic score combines insights from microbial and cellular transcripts to give a comprehensive view of how your diet and lifestyle may be impacting your cardiovascular health.
Brain & Cognitive Health
The brain is the master controller of our health, constantly monitoring and adapting to the world around us while coordinating activities between various organ systems. At the same time, it carries all the thoughts, emotions, and memories that make us individuals, making it arguably the most important organ in our body. The gut microbiome helps in the development of our brain and nervous system as well as the management of neurological functions. Many neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA are produced in the gut, and other microbial metabolites can also strongly influence brain function. Other important factors that influence our brain and cognitive health come from cellular signals associated with stress management, circadian rhythm, and methylation. Your Brain & Cognitive score combines insights from microbial and cellular transcripts to give a comprehensive view of how your diet and lifestyle may be impacting your cognitive health.
These new scores go beyond your gut microbiome and explore the second most diverse microbial community in your body through the mouth! Just like your gut microbiome is responsible for many of your body’s functions - like digestion, metabolism, and your immune system - new research is coming out now every day on the role a healthy oral microbiome plays in these areas and more.
Your body is a complex ecosystem full of communities working to keep you healthy so optimizing them all together as they co-exist can help you function at peak performance.
Using insights into the microbial flora that live inside your mouth, we are continuing to reframe the way you view your interaction with your food. You are what you eat, beginning with the first bite. From the moment we introduce foods to our body, our dietary choices are immediately impacting our full body’s health. The microbes that live inside our mouths are shaped by the foods we consume. Our dietary choices can have a direct impact and an indirect impact that influences the colonies that thrive and support us. The oral microbiome also helps determine the health of our mouth and throat, competing with pathogens and supporting dental health. Additionally, the nutrients we consume also can shape our ability to heal and regenerate from injury or illness. In response, the colonies in our mouth shape our gut microbiome (as they travel through the digestive system) and further determine which microbes more abundantly appear in the colon. Ultimately the health of our oral microbiome impacts our entire body - so let’s not forget that everything is connected!
How Can My Food & Supplement Recommendations Improve My Scores?
Everything we do is centered around personalization. By treating each person as an individual with a unique set of health circumstances, we are finally making progress in shifting away from a one-size-fits-all approach to precision nutrition and health. Thus, your recommendations are specifically tied to your individual scores.
Although many components of your recommendations may contain similar nutrients to foods on your ‘Minimize’ list, each individual item was expertly chosen to serve your unique needs. Even the most subtle of differences may make a difference to the overall health of you and your gut.
Based on our analysis, here are just a few examples to demonstrate how specific recommendations might be tailored to one individual’s results:
Which Foods Are Contributing to Your Chronic Bad Breath?
We’re all familiar with foods that can cause breath odor, like garlic and onion, but chronic bad breath is a problem all on its own. It may surprise you that some of the foods traditionally deemed incredibly healthy may not be suitable for the microbial colonies in your mouth. Certain foods rich in compounds that have been known to interact with individuals and lead to toxic or smelly odors associated with chronic bad breath. Many of these foods might surprise you - such as certain citrus fruits, watermelon, and even healthy, fermented soy foods like tofu!
Though every person has a unique oral microbiome - which has a higher diversity in comparison to the gut - the source of your chronic bad breath may vary significantly from your neighbor. That’s why it is important to test and find out rather than avoid general foods that actually might be incredibly important as a superfood to you!
Which Berry is Best for Your Immune and Cellular Health?
The beneficial properties of berries are usually attributed to their diverse composition of ‘polyphenols,’ a family of antioxidants. Many berries have various anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects on the human body, but they are also needed to support the gut lining and the microbiome that supports the lining and many health functions.. For example, cranberry is beneficial in stimulating Akkermansia, a type of bacteria that lives in the gut and supports its mucosal lining. Akkermansia has anti-inflammatory effects and is associated with leaner metabolic profiles and better insulin sensitivity and glycemic control.
Blueberries can be helpful for some people with certain types of inflammatory and/or stress response pathways. They are a good source of Vitamin C and rich in antioxidant ‘polyphenols’ with neuro-protective effects1. However, when a person has some of the blueberry viruses active in the gut microbiome, this berry may do more harm than good as it will help the virus thrive. This can cause more pro-inflammatory effects, as viruses easily cross the intestinal barrier and may even reach the blood brain barrier. Instead, depending on the host and microbiome pathways and specific gene expression, other sources of anthocyanins and other antioxidants will be recommended, such as raspberry, for example. It has similar and other documented benefits2.
Strawberries contain many nutrients, one of which is an antioxidant called fisetin. Depending on the overall functional profiles and what is known from the person’s data, this nutrient in the form of strawberries as food or as a supplement can be of particular benefit to some people who need antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, and mitochondrial health support3.
If Cutting Out Eggs is Right For You
Choline, which can come from the diet (eggs, animal protein, some cruciferous vegetables, legumes) or supplements, is known for its tissue repair and cognitive benefits. It can also be beneficial for those people whose Cellular Stress score is high with possible damage to cellular membranes since choline is used for cell membrane integrity or support, involved in making DNA, as well as in fat transport and metabolism. On the other hand, microbial production of TMA (trimethylamine) can be enhanced by choline. TMA can be recycled through the blood to the liver where it gets converted to TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide), which has been implicated in adverse cardiometabolic effects.
The Future Name in Digital Health Analysis: Where We’re Headed
As excited as we are about our innovative Full Body Intelligence Test, this has proven to be just one of the many accomplishments we have achieved since our doors opened. Our dedication to one day overcoming chronic diseases has been unrelenting. We have fought to redefine how the world views and treats illness, starting with how we view our food.
As Hippocrates said, ‘Food is thy medicine’ - and rather than consistently working to treat the symptoms of disease, we are committed to eliminating it from our vocabulary. Let us then consider how the foods we consume are broken down by our bodies and converted into the essential components that drive life forward - and ultimately impact our risk of disease.
After all, nutrition is preventative medicine - and precision nutrition is preventative medicine for you.
By understanding the fundamentals of nutrition and how foods interact with our bodies, scientists believe we may be holding the missing link to disease research. But with the introduction of the gut microbiome - and now the oral microbiome - researchers are finally filling the gaps to so many illnesses, unmasking the complex relationship between our food and our gut ecosystem. Despite the nutritional value of all the different compounds in our food, it is from the efforts of our gut microbiota that we reap the most benefit. Without this necessary aspect of digestion, many of the nutrients that support a healthy body would not be made available. At Viome, we have continued to support these research efforts in our lab, and in labs around the world as we further investigate the causes of chronic disease.
Part of our promise has been to continually develop cutting-edge technology and support the development of innovative health tech. We may have started with our Gut Intelligence Test, and expanded with our Full Body Intelligence Test - including our own line of precision food and supplement recommendations - but we’re committed to so much more.
We believe in the future of Viome’s research and development teams expanding on our current lines to incorporate a series of other potential tests. We hope to continue to develop new scores that identify more pathways to improve physical, mental, and emotional health to make us more resilient to chronic disease. With so much out there to learn, we’re always expanding and building relationships across academic and research institutions alike. Every day, our Viome family gets a little bigger - and a little smarter - all in our journey toward decoding what optimal health looks like for each individual person.
References:
Dias GP, Cavegn N, Nix A, et al. (2012). Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2012;2012:541971.
Kowalska K, Olejnik A, Zielińska-Wasielica J, et al. (2019). Jour of Func. Food. Vol 62. 2019;103568.
Yousefzadeh MJ, Zhu Y, McGowan SJ, et al. (2018). EBioMedicine. 2018;36:18-28.
SHARE
