Near total lack of transparency. Almost no actionable info. Hawks their own expensive supplements. Expensive.
I admit it: I’m a sucker for metrics. Fitness trackers that keep tabs on my steps and sleep? Let’s go. A DEXA scan to give me too much information about my body composition? I’m here for it. Yet after taking Viome’s Full Body Intelligence Test, I found myself staring at my page full of results and thinking, “What the hell do I do with this?”
On the surface, the Full Body Intelligence Test is the most thorough kit Viome sells. It claims to uncover “how your cellular + microbiome activity impacts your energy, digestion, weight, mood, sleep, + long-term health using results from an easy at-home test.” It also promises 50-plus detailed health scores and 370-plus personalized food and supplement recommendations, as well as “clear insights that connect your gut microbiome to your overall health.”
In reality, there is very little clarity to these “insights,” there’s almost no transparency behind the “health scores,” and the list of food recommendations is all over the place. If I were a cynic, I would think that Viome is making things deliberately obtuse so people get overwhelmed and just shell out for Viome’s wildly expensive “Precision Formulas” (i.e., supplements). Am I a cynic? I might be a cynic.
Here’s the Scoop
Photograph: Brent Rose
The Full Body Intelligence test kit has three separate components: Saliva, Blood, and Stool. Once you register your kit and fill out the online questionnaire (medical history, issues you’re having, etc.), you’re ready to go.
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.
The Health tab also has a My Longevity subsection, which shows you your Biological Age (mine is allegedly eight years younger than I actually am), and Inflammaging, which is a term describing chronic, systemic inflammation. I got a Medium (i.e., Improve) on that.
Below that is My Microbiome Profile. “A-ha!” I thought. “Here at last I’ll see exactly what was leading to all my scores.” Yeah, not so much. Here you get a score for Gut Richness & Diversity, Oral Microbiome, and Gut Dysbiosis, which “assesses the level of disruption in the microbial balance and activities of your gut microbiome.” (Generally speaking, a wide array of resident gut microbes protects you from any harmful ones that might sneak in.)
Below that, you can click My Gut Microbes and you get … a list. A very long list of any bacteria, fungi, viruses, or microorganisms that were present in your stool sample. You don’t get any information about the abundance of these microorganisms, or which might be associated with which health outcome. You can’t even click them to get more info. They’re just listed.
I have concerns here. For starters, it showed just 105 different strains of bacteria in my sample. A few months ago, I reviewed the Jona microbiome test that uses the gold-standard “shotgun test” that a gastroenterologist would. The shotgun test uses DNA to identify as many species as possible. Jona found 456 organisms present. Further, the Jona test showed the relative abundance for each strain, what is considered normal range, and clicking on any of them would reveal a trove of information and references. Viome has none of that.
Rather than using DNA, Viome uses RNA-based metatranscriptomic sequencing to identify the microbes that are active right now—er, at the time I took the test. But not including the relative abundance is a little panic-inducing. For example, Viome’s results said I tested positive for an archaea called Methanobrevibacter smithii. This could be alarming if you looked just at Viome’s results, since when you google this bacteria, it says it may cause bloating and all kinds of other stuff. (Also, why should I have to leave the app to google all these bacteria?)
However, my Jona test results showed that the bacteria is present, but my relative abundance is actually below the normal range. That’s a pretty critical bit of info, since this means I probably don’t have to worry about it.
Up next is the Nutrition page. At the top is My Foods, and I've got 91 foods listed under my Belly Ballooner. If I click any one of them to find out why they’re on my list, it just shows a generic blurb that says they are a High FODMAP food.
For the majority of them, I'm told to "minimize" my intake. That includes basically all beans, winter squash and pumpkin, wheat, rye, and virtually every fruit that grows on a tree. My list of things to “avoid” outright is only eight items long, but they were all surprises. It listed aloe vera juice, cashews, cauliflower, pistachio, and prunes. I have never noticed any kind of reaction from those foods. In fact, cashews, pistachios, and cauliflower are some of my favorites. It also had 251 foods I can "enjoy" and 16 labeled as “Superfoods.” It's a lot to take in.
Basically, it's pointing me toward a low FODMAP diet, without telling me why I should be on a low FODMAP diet. Yet there are some FODMAP foods that are missing. There's very little insight here. Meanwhile, it has flax seeds listed as one of my Superfoods (for blood sugar response and "supports mood"), which I know for sure often upsets my stomach. Tomatoes, which also upset my stomach, were on my Enjoy list.
Below My Foods is My Recipes. My list contained 486 healthy-looking recipes, most of which actually looked pretty tasty. The recipes tended to be stacked with ingredients on my Enjoy or Superfoods list, with the occasional ingredient falling under Minimize. It was nice to finally get some actionable information, but they also just seemed like generally healthy, low-carb, veggie- and protein-forward recipes. They don't really look very different from what I already eat.
Getting the Goods
Viome via Brent Rose
Lastly, on the Health page, we have My Formulas, aka supplements. This is where we wade into territory I would describe as murky at best. Viome uses your test results to formulate supplements with ingredients that are allegedly customized to you, broadly broken down into Precision Supplements (25 ingredients, mostly herbs, minerals, and vitamins), Gut Formula (12 ingredients, mostly probiotics), Oral Lozenges (12 ingredients), and Toothpaste & Gel (25 ingredients).
Let me address the elephant in the room: Being a company that sells both these tests and these supplements is a conflict of interest. The company is incentivized to find things wrong with you so you’ll want to check out its regime of supplements. Viome even has a page on why eating whole foods isn’t enough, although most doctors will say that a balanced, healthful diet precludes the need for supplements.
There isn’t a lot of actionable information in the personalized report—nothing about exercise, mental health, or sleep, for example. Finding details about recommendations is difficult to impossible. But the company makes it so very easy to click that Shop My Formulas button. It’s the only easy thing you can do on the site.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that the recommended formulas are very pricey. For example, if all I wanted was the Toothpaste & Gel, that starts at the low introductory price of $1.67 a day. For brushing my teeth and gargling. If you read the fine print, that’s the discounted rate of $50.15 for the first six months, and then $59 for each month after that. Sure! Who doesn’t spend $708 a year on toothpaste and mouthwash, right?
If I were to purchase all of the personalized supplements that Viome recommends—that includes the capsules, the oral lozenges, and the toothpaste and gel formula—it would be $203.15 a month for the first six months with the discount, then $239 a month after, for a grand total of $2,652.90 that first year and $2,868 each year thereafter. That is a tremendous amount of money to spend on a product without being able to see any of the data driving those decisions.
The supplement industry as a whole is notoriously unregulated. That was one of the things I liked about the Jona microbiome test—at least Jona doesn’t sell anything aside from the test itself, and basically all of the recommendations were easily understandable diet and lifestyle modifications, with a focus on eating whole foods.
Now, I’m not a dietician or anything. I reached out to clinical nutritionist Alyson Roux, CNS, LDN who told me that these home tests are not all created equal, and there’s a lack of standardization. Some can be helpful, but it depends on what the client wants to address. There are a lot of concerns from doctors that people are taking these tests, feeding their results into ChatGPT or some other LLM, and injuring themselves.
Also, she didn't want to name specific companies, but doctors have been finding that when people send split samples (i.e., two samples taken from the same person at the same time), they're often getting two totally different results, which really puts the whole validity of these tests into question.
I showed her my results and recommendations. “What is the mechanism for recommending which foods to eat or avoid? It's super unclear,” she asked. She also saw a lot of inconsistencies in the foods that I was being told to avoid. “Perhaps there's some clinical nuance that would allow this to be presented in a useful way, but it’s totally missing here.”
Roux pointed out some other significant hazards. “We’re seeing people who are desperate and trying tests like this, and you can actually develop food intolerances,” she warned. “Well-intentioned people put themselves on these restrictive diets, and suddenly they can only tolerate five foods. Microbial diversity gets even worse, and that results in more anxiety and more fear around food.”
She said she has had clients who are suffering from eating disorders bring in Viome results, and it led them to avoiding even more foods.
Viome via Brent Rose
Viome’s proprietary RNA sequencing method has been reviewed and adopted by biopharma companies and research institutions, like Scripps and New York University. Ultimately, you’re supposed to trust that a company that would contribute to peer-reviewed publications would not lead you astray.
However, as someone who likes to be able to see the science behind why it’s telling you to eat one thing or avoid another, it’s hard to blindly trust it. Even if you go to a doctor, you’re supposed to get second opinions. When you add in the fact that there are very few actionable suggestions besides buying the company’s own line of very expensive supplements, that trust is eroded further still.
The tests aren’t cheap either, coming in at $300 to $400 for the Full Body Intelligence test I did (depending on promos), or $280 for just the Gut Intelligence or $260 for the Oral Health Intelligence tests.
It's understandable why people would seek out solutions like this. Health care in the United States is wildly expensive, and people with digestive issues often suffer in silence with problems that are hard to diagnose or misdiagnosed. Unfortunately, Viome seems to take advantage of that desperation rather than offer sustainable solutions.
