Viome Full Body Intelligence Test Review: Little Clarity, Pricey Supplements
When you wake up the next morning, before you have eaten or drunk anything, you spit into a small vial. Then you prick your fingertip with the mini lancet provided, which doesn’t hurt at all. You fill four minivettes (think tiny turkey basters) from the little drops of blood that form on your fingertip. Once this is accomplished, you get an embarrassing poop. The kit comes with a small paper hammock that sticks to your toilet seat and hangs down a bit.
Poop on it, then use the spoon provided to pick out a small ball (the size of a pea, according to Viome), put it in a bottle, and screw the lid on very, very tightly, as you then shake it for 30 seconds. You can then rinse the hammock, seal your various tubes and send it by mail.
It took a little over two weeks before I received notification that my results were ready. At the top of the home page is My Health Overview, which offers an overview of what the tests found. It was a litany of bad news.
It revealed excessive gas production, high microbial toxin production, increased intestinal lining permeability, poor nutrient absorption, poor protein digestion, elevated inflammation impacting cognitive performance, suboptimal cortisol handling, suboptimal neurotransmitter production, suboptimal mitochondrial function, oral pH imbalance, elevated inflammation impacting cardiac functioning, and increased metabolic stress.
Well, shit.
As you can imagine, I found all of this both upsetting and alarming. Clicking on one of these tabs will bring you a short paragraph with a general explanation of what the term means.
For example, for mitochondrial health, I got a score of 57. Clicking on the Mitochondrial Health tab leads to a quick explanation of what that means (Viome defines it as a composite functional score that reflects whether the genes responsible for mitochondrial function are healthy) and also shows the contributing scores, which for me were 56 for mitochondrial biogenesis pathways and 54 for energy production pathways.
I can also click those for a one-paragraph explanation of each. At this point I was three layers deep, but Viome doesn’t tell you in the app what it’s actually testing. We contacted Viome and Grant Antoine, naturopathic physician and nutrition and clinical manager at Viome, responded that Viome uses RNA sequencing to decode the gene activity of mitochondrial proteins; the company has its own research center with its own proprietary sequencing methods. Antoine also highlighted that raw RNA sequencing data is neither interpretable nor useful without Viome’s AI-based bioinformatics analysis.
However, without any numbers that I could verify or compare to other experts, it was difficult to trust these results.
It was just one of many. Viome informed me that I had 25 scores at “Maintain” (colored green) and a whopping 47 at “Improve” (yellow). I guess I’m lucky I didn’t have any that were rated “Caution” (red). I haven’t found any data explaining why any of these scores were so low. But regardless, there was one button that was almost always there, visibly visible on every page, no matter how far you scroll: Buy My Plans. But we will come back to that.
Even the score
Viome via Brent Rose
Clicking on the Health tab did little to clear up my confusion. At the top is My Health Zones, where you can click on broad health categories, like gut and digestive health, immunity, or heart and metabolic health. You can click on each to get your scores on each component, but again, you won’t know Why you marked what you did. It’s all in a black box somewhere.
