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When you wake up the next morning, before you have anything to eat or drink, you spit into a small vial. Then you prick your finger with the small scalpel attached, which doesn’t hurt at all. You fill four small holes (think small turkey breasts) with tiny drops of blood that form on your fingertips. Once you’re done, you’ll have a weird tube. The set comes with a small paper hammock that sticks to the toilet seat and dangles slightly.
Poop on it, then use the scoop provided to pick out a small ball (about the size of a green pea, according to Viome), put it in a vial, and then screw the cap on very tightly, as you then shake it for 30 seconds. You can then clean the hammock, seal the various tubes, and mail it.
It took just over two weeks before I received notification that my results were ready. At the top of the home page is My Health Overview, which gives a quick overview of what the tests have found. It was a series of bad news.
Found excessive gas production, high microbial toxin production, increased intestinal lining permeability, poor nutrient absorption, poor protein digestion, high inflammation that affects cognitive performance, suboptimal cortisol management, suboptimal neurotransmitter production, suboptimal mitochondrial function, oral pH imbalance, high inflammation that affects heart performance, and increased metabolic stress.
Well, shit.
As you can imagine, I found it all confusing and unsettling. Clicking on any of these tabs will bring up a short paragraph with a general explanation of what the term means.
For example, for mitochondrial health, it scored 57. Clicking on the “Mitochondrial Health” tab leads to a quick explanation of what that is — Fiume 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 56 for the mitochondrial biogenesis pathways and 54 for the energy production pathways.
I can also click Those For a one-paragraph explanation of each. At this point, you’re three layers deep, but Viome doesn’t tell you in the app what it’s actually testing. We reached out to Viome, and Grant Antoine, MD, a naturopathic physician and clinical lead at Viome, responded that Viome uses RNA sequencing To decode the genetic activity of mitochondrial proteins; The company has its own research facility Special sequencing methods. Antoine also pointed out that raw data from RNA sequencing is not interpretable or useful without Viome’s AI-powered bioinformatics analysis.
However, without any numbers I could double-check or go beyond any other experts, it was difficult to trust these results.
That was just one of many. Vium told me I had a score of 25 for “Conservation” (green) and 47 for “Improvement” (yellow). I think I’m lucky because I didn’t get any of them labeled as “Attention” (in red). I couldn’t find any data on why any Of these scores were very low. But regardless, there was one button that was almost always there, clearly visible on seemingly every page, no matter how much I scrolled: Shop My Formula. But we will come back to that.
Until the result
Vium via Brent Rose
Clicking on the Health tab did little to clear up my confusion. At the top are the My Health areas, where you can click on broad health categories, such as gut and digestive health, immunity, or heart and metabolic health. You can click on each one to get your score on each component, but again, you won’t find out Why I recorded what I did. It’s all in a black box somewhere.