When you wake up the next morning, before you’ve had anything to eat or drink, you spit into a little vial. Then you prick your fingertip with the provided mini lancet, which didn’t hurt at all. You fill four minivettes (think tiny turkey basters) from the little drops of blood that form on your fingertip. Once that’s accomplished, you get to have an awkward poop. The kit comes with a little paper hammock that sticks to the seat of your toilet and hangs down a little.
Poop on it, and then you use the provided scoop to select a little ball (about the size of a green pea, according to Viome), put it in a vial, and screw the lid on very, very tightly, because you then shake it for 30 seconds. You can then flush the hammock, seal up your various tubes, and mail it off.
It took a little more than two weeks before I got a notification that my results were ready. At the top of the homepage is My Health Overview, which offers a snapshot of what the tests found. It was a litany of bad news.
It found excessive gas production, high microbial toxin production, increased gut lining permeability, poor nutrient absorption, poor protein digestion, high inflammation impacting cognitive performance, suboptimal cortisol management, suboptimal neurotransmitter production, suboptimal mitochondrial function, imbalance in oral pH, high inflammation impacting heart functioning, and increased metabolic stress.
Well, shit.
As you can imagine, I found all of that both overwhelming and alarming. Clicking any of those tabs will give 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 is—Viome defines it as a composite functional score that reflects whether the genes responsible for running mitochondria are healthy—and also shows the contributing scores, which for me were a 56 for mitochondrial biogenesis pathways and a 54 for energy production pathways.
I can also click those to get a one-paragraph explainer of each. At this point, I was three layers deep, but Viome does not tell you in the app what it’s actually testing. We reached out to Viome, and Grant Antoine, a naturopathic doctor and the nutrition and clinical lead at Viome, responded that Viome uses RNA sequencing to decode the gene activity of mitochondrial proteins; the company does have its own research facility with its own proprietary sequencing methods. Antoine also pointed out that the raw data from RNA sequencing isn’t interpretable or useful without Viome’s AI-enabled bioinformatic analysis.
However, without any numbers that I could double-check or run past any other experts, it was hard to trust these results.
That was just one of many. Viome informed me that I had 25 scores to “Maintain” (colored green) and a whopping 47 to “Improve” (yellow). I guess I’m fortunate that I didn’t have any that were rated “Attention” (red). I didn’t find any data on why any of these scores were so low. But no matter what, there was one button that was nearly ever-present, conspicuously looming on seemingly every page, no matter how far you scroll: Shop My Formulas. But we’ll come back to that.
Even the Score
Viome via Brent Rose
Clicking over to the Health tab didn’t do much to clear up my confusion. Up top is My Health Zones, where you can click through broad health categories, like Gut & Digestive Health, Immunity, or Heart & Metabolic Health. You can click into each to get your scores on each component, but again, you won’t find out why you scored what you did. It’s all in a black box somewhere.
