When you wake up the next morning, before you eat or drink, you spit into a small bowl. Then you prick your fingertip with the provided mini lancet, which doesn’t hurt at all. You fill four minivettes (think little turkey basters) from the tiny drops of blood that form on your fingertip. Once that’s done, you can have an awkward shit. The kit comes with a small paper cradle that attaches to your toilet seat and hangs down a bit.

Poop on it, and then you use the provided scoop to select a small ball (like the size of a green pea, according to Viome), put it in a bowl, and screw the lid very, very tightly, because you will then shake it for 30 seconds. You can flush the cradle, seal your various pipes, and ship it.

It took over two weeks before I received notification that my results were ready. At the top of the homepage is My Health Overview, which offers a snapshot of what the tests have found. It’s a litany of bad news.

It found excess gas production, high microbial toxin production, increased gut lining permeability, poor nutrient absorption, poor protein digestion, high inflammation affecting cognitive performance, suboptimal cortisol management, suboptimal neurotransmitter production, suboptimal mitochondrial function, oral pH imbalance, high inflammation affecting heart function, and increased metabolic stress.

Well, shit.

As you can imagine, I found all of that very scary and alarming. Clicking on any of the 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 shows whether the genes responsible for running the mitochondria are healthy-and also shows the contributing scores, which for me is a 56 for mitochondrial energy pathogenesis and bi5 energy production pathway.

I can also click the to get a paragraph explainer for each. At this point, I’m three layers deep, but Viome doesn’t tell you in the app what it’s actually testing. We contacted Viome, and Grant Antoine, a naturopathic doctor and Viome’s nutrition and clinical lead, responded that Viome uses RNA sequencing to decode gene activity in mitochondrial proteins; the company has its own research facility with it own proprietary sequencing methods. Antoine also pointed out that raw data from RNA sequencing would not be interpretable or useful without Viome’s AI-enabled bioinformatic analysis.

However, without any numbers I can double check or run with any other experts, it’s hard to trust these results.

It was just one of many. Viome informed me that I have 25 points in “Maintain” (green color) and a whopping 47 in “Improve” (yellow). I think I’m lucky that I didn’t get an “Attention” (red) rating. I can’t find any data as to why whatever in these scores are very low. But regardless, there is one button that is almost always there, clearly visible on every page, no matter how far you scroll: Buy My Formulas. But let’s get back to that.

Even the Score

Viome by Brent Rose

Clicking on the Health tab did nothing to clear up my confusion. At the top is My Health Zones, where you can click on a wide range of health categories, such as Gut & Digestive Health, Immunity, or Heart & Metabolic Health. You can click on each one to get your scores for each component, but again, you never know. Why you scored what you did. It’s in the black box somewhere.