Analyze Your Gut to Fix Your Health: Here’s How

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Our guest today almost needs no introduction, but I did promise you before every episode this year, I'm going to tell you exactly what you're going to get out of the episode so you can decide that it's worth your time to listen to it. Because your time is your second most important asset after your energy. And today you're going to learn what's happening in the very cutting edge of human biology from micro macro level, your cellular health and even how that connects to broader planetary issues. With a dear friend and a multi guest on the show who's been on my stage at the biohacking conference multiple times and a guy who's really changing the world of gut biome in very big ways. It's my friend Naveen Jain, who's CEO and founder of viome. And full disclosure, I am an early advisor and investor in the company and they're kicking ass. Adding thousands, actually tens of thousands of new bacteria that live in the gut to our databases. Just changing the world in many different ways. Naveen, welcome back to the podcast.

Well, first of all, Dave, it's always an honor and pleasure to speak with you and your tribe. I love your tribe. I mean they are one of the most curious human beings on planet and curiosity is what drives the humanity forward. The day you stop being curious is the day you die. So I just worry about the people who have lost the curiosity. They refuse to challenge the status quo and they expect to be alive. I mean, I just don't get it. I mean, it's okay to be wrong, but it's not not okay to be not curious.

Thank you for saying that straight up front. I mean, I, I've been wrong about some things. I thought kale was bad for you, but I didn't know how bad for you it was. So it turns out I wasn't anti kale enough early on. I mean, kidding. I know you actually aren't a Kale hater, but bottom line is you and I both are almost certainly wrong about some little thing that we're doing. But we're directionally right and we're constantly improving. And it's the people who say this is how it is and it will never change that I think are really stuck. And since I first connected with you years ago at the Xprize 10th anniversary trip with the Ansari family funding it, I. I was just blown away because I feel like I'm back in fifth grade playing with someone and we're. Look, what would Happen if you did this? What happen if you do this? So I'm going to ask you that before we get into the future of where things are going with the biome and with the planet and all that. And I've asked this before, but you always give me a different answer. So I want to hear it this time. What's keeping the curiosity alive? I mean, you're a little older than I am, and seriously, you're like a kid. What's going on there?

Well, I just said that. To me, curiosity is what keeps you alive. I mean, curiosity, what not only drives the humanity forward, it drives an individual forward. And you know, to me, a childlike curiosity is what allows you to constantly challenge the foundation of what every expert has taken it for granted. So as you mentioned, when experts tells you this is how it is, and there is someone out there say, why does it have to be this way? Why can't we change it? Why can't we do it differently? And those are the people who end up disrupting the industry from outside in. The industry never gets changed from inside out. It's always gets changed from outside in. And to me, that curiosity is what takes someone who is not in that industry to say, you know what? I'm going to ask a completely different question. And by asking that question, I'm going to challenge everything the way people are doing it. And what you end up doing is someone who is an expert is going to tell you you are crazy. And 10 years later they're going to say, you know what? I always told him that was going to work. Right? And that's how it happened. Always happens. A day before the breakthrough is a crazy idea. And day after the breakthrough, it's obvious idea.

Yeah, it was that way for flight. It's been that way for almost every big innovation. But you take a lot of hits. And I see so many people get kind of bitter about that, but you've skipped that whole step. And you're just constantly curious and happy. And I've seen you pretty stressed over the years, but even then, you're still curious. You handle it in a different way. And do you think that's your gut bacteria doing it or is that something else?

Well, at the end of the day, our mindset determines how we react to the world around us. And you could argue that our puppet masters, who are inside our gut, are probably controlling our mindset. But that's for some other day. But the fact really is your mindset determines your reaction. No one can make you angry. No one can make you frustrated. You make yourself angry. You make yourself frustrated. So when you say I am, that this someone else stresses me out. No, no, no, no. You are the only one that has a power to stress you out. There is no one else in this world who has that power and should not have that power.

Now, I kind of believe that, Naveen, but I have access to a broad array of technologies, say at upgrade labs. And I'll just pick one at random. Like the pulse electromagnetic frequencies we use. I know how to configure that system to absolutely stress you out against your will. Right. So there's some biological stressors that even if you're a curious good human, it seems like we have the ability to knock ourselves out of that healthy space. And we can do it chemically, we can do it electrically, we can do it with radioactive elements or pulsing lights. There's all kinds of things. So some percentage of this is within our conscious control. But some of it's just the environment and it feels like we're hurting the environment that hurts us.

Agreed. And what I meant to say was that it is our conscious decision that we take of what foods we eat, what are the things we are doing to our body, what, how, what kind of environment we live in. And all those external things obviously impact us. So what we do impact us and it impacts the universe. What we do in the universe impacts everything that happens inside us. We, we are an ecosystem walking, talking ecosystem. Living within a larger ecosystem, we call that universe. And everything is interconnected. So what we do and what we do in the universe is always impacting us. So yes, what I meant to say was no other human beings, just because of their presence, can change how you react to the world. They can say you are naive and you are, Dave, you are comparing completely. You know, it's crazy, you know, you're completely out of your mind. And guess what? It's their opinion. As long as you're not looking for their approval, you don't really care what they think of you. Right? These are not the people I'm looking for advice. And I don't care what advice they have to give me.

I have seen you exceptionally cleanly blow people off who are trying to give you advice and you don't want it. And you're like, nope, next. And you have zero guilt about it, but you're not a jerk about it either. Right? And that's cool.

You don't have to be a jerk. I mean, first of all, you know, I look at you and obviously I have now worked with you for at least more than a decade since we first met. And every interaction we have, it's always about learning something new. There is never a time when I sat down with you, there is not something new I learned. There is never a time where I did not come out and say that time. Every minute of their value was spent right. And those are the only people you and I spend time with. We just are way past where you spend time with someone because you need something from them. That time has come and gone. I don't spend time with any assholes. I don't care who they are.

It's just not, you know, it's easy to say that, Naveen. And if. If someone's listening to this show right now, Naveen is speaking the truth. I mean, he is very not rude, courteous, but just. You're probably the most curated of those relationships and you can tell. I think that's part of what makes you happy. It's pretty impressive. I don't know that I'm quite at that level, but I aspire to it. We'll put it that way.

Well, I can tell you, Dave, you. I have met the people that you associate with and every one of them is a group of a tribe member that I would always be part of.

Thank you, Naveen. I'm grateful to have an amazing community and I still make some mistakes every now and then. I'm getting better at hiring the right people and working with the right people and spotting when people are off the line. I think your experience as an entrepreneur has taught you that skill probably before I did. So you're pretty darn good at just sniffing that out. I'm asking about mindset stuff, but we're here to talk about the latest stuff going on with Viome and for listeners like, look, Naveen and I aren't here to sell you Viome. And I'm also going to tell you, yes, you go to Viome, which is the best test of your human mitochondria and your gut bacteria. Just your whole health intelligence. You can use code Dave. He'll give you $20 off. It's very rare to get any discount with Viome. So V I O M E But that's not the reason we're here. We're here to share really cool stuff with you. And so I just want to get that kind of off the table there. We're going to talk some about that. But a lot of this is just about the human condition, the condition of the world and where the future is going. Because what Naveen shared on stage at the last biohacking conference in our fireside chat was the most popular talk. And it was so mind blowing because it wasn't about, oh, you know, change, change your gut bacteria so you have better poop and some better inflammation, although that's part of it. It was kind of major game changing stuff. So tell me the latest Naveen. Like what's going on in the very cutting edge of microbial gene expression and things like that give us all up to date.

So I think, Dave. So first of all, I'm just going to step back and let people know that we analyze your whole body and it's not about just the gut microbiome we look at. You know, now very soon we are launching a new product. Dave, you're going to be getting the first of it very soon which is going to be a full body intelligence. So it used to be a gut intelligence we launched the health gut intelligence, was actually analyzing your gut microbiome we launched. Health intelligence looks at your human host and the gut microbiome and the interaction between the two. And now we're launching a full body intelligence that takes saliva, few drops of your finger prick, blood and a touch of a stool. And then we analyze the whole body. And what we're realizing is that we thought the gut microbiome was absolutely critical to everything that happens. And I'm not taking that away. But what we are realizing now is your oral microbiome is turning out to be just as important as your gut microbiome, which I think most of the science world has completely ignored. And it turns out that what we are seeing is in your saliva, your gut microbiome, your oral microbiome is more diverse than your gut microbiome. So think about it for a second. There are more types of organisms in your mouth and than they are in your gut. Even though they are, you know, trillions, 39 trillion of them in your gut and only couple of trillion in your mouth. But the diversity is much higher. Now imagine when, you know, when our mother would say chew your food, what does that really meant? That chew your food? Was she really saying, hey, if you take a big food somehow it's going to get stuck in your throat? No. The idea was by chewing your food, you were actually allowing your oral microbiome to pre process that food. And by pre processing that food, it was sending the signal down to the gut microbiome about what is coming. And by pre processing the food, it became easily absorbable by the nutrition, by your gut lining. And that was the fundamental thing. So when we are eating food too fast or when we are eating food, when we are stressed now think about what's happening. We come from work where most people who are not, I would say, fortunate enough to be an entrepreneur or even who are entrepreneurs, they come home, they are stressed from everything that's happening. Their boss is chewing them out. And if you happen to be the boss, then everyone else is chewing you out because they all need something from you. And you say, just leave me alone. I got plenty of my own problems to deal with right now. Irrespective, you come home, you are stressed, and your spouses are stressing you out because they think you're not spending enough time with them and you're now eating your food. Guess what happens when you're stressed out? You are actually in a sympathetic mode. Fight or flight response. And when you are in the fight or flight response, the number one thing that happens, your body says you don't need to worry about digesting the food. You're about to become a lunch for someone else. The tiger is chasing you, right? Guess what? Your digestive system is completely shut down. And at that point, the body is in a fight or flight mode. So when you're eating that food, that food is not getting digested at all, right? And that's the reason why many cultures have actually made it a part of actually doing the gratitude. What do we do? We actually calm down. We do the gratitude. The idea is to bring your body into the parasympathetic mode so you're out of the. Out of the fight or flight response. So your digestive system is now ready to digest. Right? And those were the things that, you know, you learn anecdotally from your mother to chew your food or always say your gratitude and do the blessing before you eat your food. But they all had a scientific basis. The another thing that really, really surprised me was about a month ago or so we were looking at this data and where my scientist is so excited, and he's telling me that how these are many of the inflammation is happening in the gu. And he says, look, we can see these microorganisms are converting the corticoid into testosterone, a hormone called corticoid, converting them to another hormone, testosterone. And the testosterone locally in the gut lining is creating the lesion in the gut lining. And he's excited about that. And I'm excited about. Your corticoid isn't come from stress, you see? Yes. And I say, so my mother was right when she used to say stress causes cancer. She was right. Stress causes cancer.

Don't you want, though? I mean, don't you want testosterone? That's what I do.

But not in the local gut lining. Because, see, the testosterone are really good, but when they happen to be locally around the gut lining, they actually are extremely inflammatory.

Okay, I did not know that. So oral testosterone is inflammatory.

The gut testosterone.

Oh, wow. Okay. So how would we avoid having gut testosterone?

Basically, I told them that actually the microorganisms convert the corticoid, the stress, the stress hormone into testosterone. So the idea is to reduce your stress. Right. And the idea would be to do the meditation and actually generally be in a calm state of mind. And I think you can go back to the Eastern philosophy of the world where they can, you know, you say, look, it doesn't matter what's happening around you, you control how you react to it. Right. So world around you could be falling apart. And which, by the way, in general is whether it's a political nightmare that you have where everyone else wants to tell you what you should or should not be doing today. You should be going here, you should be sitting here, you should be wearing a mask, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. And God knows another country wants to attack another country. You know what, the shit show is going on everywhere.

And that gives you corticosteroids, right? Yeah, that's not what we need.

And then, by the way, our kids give us, you know, kids give us stress, our spouses give us stress, our work gives us stress. You know, our bosses give us stress, and our employees give us stress. Stress is everywhere around us.

It is around us. And it's interesting because we talk about the mouth biome that affects the lung biome, it affects the sinus biome, and it affects the gut biome. Like, that's where stuff comes in, right?

Absolutely. By the way, it's not that it's also affects your brain. So lot of the neurodegenerative diseases are now being directly linked to actually the inflammation in your gum. Imagine what happens when you have a gum lining that's inflamed, you have bleeding. What's happening now? Your oral microbiome is going into the blood. What does that mean? Now your cytokines and all of your inflammatory markers are actually now highly inflamed, trying to kill those microorganisms. And when these microorganisms are now infecting your blood brain barrier, what are they doing? They're inflaming the blood brain barrier that Makes it permeable. Now you have infection in the brain, and that's really what leads to many of these neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, another thing we are learning, which is really interesting, is several of the diseases, including IBD and colorectal cancer. We saw this thing phenomena in people who have colorectal cancer and people who have ibd. They have this organism called Fusobacterium nucleatum that is actually 400 fold higher active in the gut in the people who have colorectal cancer, and about 20 fold higher in the people who have IBD, even though the prevalence is same whether you people have or not. And what's happening is a Fusobacter nucleatum is actually an oral microbiome. So now how does that oral microbiome is actually getting into gut? Well, couple of things. A lot of people are not taking these PPI drugs. You know, these are. They kill the acid, and there is no acid in the stomach. What's happening, there is no. These microbes that are coming from saliva are no longer getting killed. That means they now are transitioning right to the gut where they don't belong. And that's where in some people, where they either pass through and the other people where they settle down, they start to cause a whole bunch of havoc. Same thing happens in the another organism called Klebsiella pneumonia, Klebsella pneumonia, in certain people who have HLA types of B27. Something that actually starts to produce specific enzymes and proteins, amino acids that are biomimic to the same similar enzymes, and that in the protein that's in our joints. So our immune system, it starts to attack the joints. And that's how you get a lot of the autoimmune diseases. So what we're starting to see is this inflammation is a chronic inflammation is a root cause of chronic diseases. And many of the inflammation we see in the human body, we are seeing either coming from your oral microbiome or your gut microbiome. So leaky gum or leaky gut. And that also, by the way, turns out to be the number one reason for aging. And we can talk a little bit more about longevity of what we are learning. So one of the things, you know, David, we launch biological age. So when you do a volume test, you get your biological age, you get your immune health, you get your mitochondrial health, you get your cellular health, you get your gut health, you get your whole bunch of 400 other DEEP scores. And then we obviously tell you, don't eat kale. Because you have a high, you have poor oxalate mechanism.

I mean, it's true. By the way, can I point this out? My biome test straight up says you have a problem with oxalate metabolism. In fact, it's the only problem that it really highlights. And it tells me straight up, yeah, kale bad, Raw spinach bad. And I would still say someone who has better oxalate metabolism still doesn't need oxalates in their life, but they can at least tolerate it. So for me, it's like, seriously, don't do that. And for you, if you really wanted the kale salad, you can take the hit. And maybe you just don't like your kidneys or something, but it's one of those things where the compatibility of foods with you is not the same as with your spouse or your neighbors. And there's a broad spectrum of stuff we can eat that'll give us energy, that won't kill us right now we. Which is great for survival. But I mean, you changed some stuff even since I met you. What changes did you make after the latest round of the upgrades you did to the biome test?

So, first of all, Dave, one of the interesting thing about your body is it's constantly changing. So just because a certain food is good for you doesn't mean it's going to be good for you six months from now. And the food that are bad for you today doesn't mean it's going to be bad for life. So when I started vyom, in the beginning, I thought the foods that were really healthy were the food that everyone tells you to eat. Eat broccoli whether you like it or not. Eat kale and spinach is good for you. Eat cabbage and precise products, good for you. And it literally first thing it said when I did the biome test was your sulfide production is too high, causing inflammation coming from food that are high in sulfate. Avoid broccoli, cabbage, and pretty sprout. Your oxalate metabolism is not very good. Don't eat spinach and kale because you're going to end up getting a kidney stone. Guess what? If I had known before I ended up getting a kidney stone before I started viome, if I had known that, I could have avoided spinach and kale and never got the damn kidney stone. And any man who has ever gotten a kidney stone, I can tell you that it is as bad as they say it is a birthing process. It's not fun. It is painful.

So you guys heard it here first. If you don't want to experience birth as a man. Don't eat raw spinach and kale there.

Especially if you have a low oxalate metabolism. Because if you have high, it doesn't mean it's good for you, but at least you can tolerate it and you're not going to at least suffer through that pain.

It's totally true. And there's an upper limit. So most people can have some oxalate, so you save it for stuff that you really like versus raw spinach, which you probably don't really like. So I agree with you. And some people can probably eat a spinach salad every day and it's not going to be new.

But the same thing is true for people say the red meat is bad for everyone and no one should eat red meat is going to kill you and you're going to have heart disease. And that's completely bullshit because what we see is there is a carnitine that is in the red meat. And unless that carnitine is converted by your gut microbiome into tma, trimethylamine that gets absorbed in the blood and your liver converts them into something called tmao, trimethylamin oxide, that is the one that causes heart disease. But if your gut microbes are not converting, then root TMA and you should eat red meat. There are a lot of nutrients in the red meat, but when you have high tma, you need to cut it down. Right? You know, you and I both know lots of people who live to be 100 years and they eat red meat and potatoes all their life. So what is it about them is because their microbes are not producing the trimethylamine by converting the tribe to carnitine into the tma, Right?

And I have to raise my hand here again. My viome test shows I do not have TMAO forming bacteria in my gut. And that's because I don't eat industrial meat, which has the antibiotic residues in it, and I don't eat stuff with glyphosate in it, which all those are more likely to damage your gut bacteria to cause the bad guys that make TMAO to form. So if you have those, then you tweak your bacteria in your gut using the data from biome until, oh, look, now I can eat meat. And it's not converting, by the way, fish converts more than meat, more than red meat into TMAO anyway. So like, oh, I'm a pescatarian. Well, you know, that means you're just bad at science.

But it's not just any food. I mean I can tell you if your uric acid production is high, you shouldn't be taking vitamin B3 because that's going to convert into gold. So it's really that there is no such food as universal healthy food and there is no such thing as universal healthy supplements. So there are supplements that actually would harm you. So for example, if your bile acid production is high, you shouldn't be taking curcumin and turmeric because it's anti inflammatory because that's going to end up converting into bile salt, right? So same type of thing. You can now look at the stuff and say not everyone should be taking NAD or NMN or NR is because that's good for, for longevity. Only for people where they don't have high cellular senescence or they don't have the high inflammatory activity. Because if you have high cellular senescence or high cellular or high inflammation, you don't want to be boosting your mitochondria producing more free radicals, causing more inflammation, causing more stuff, right? So point really is that you have to look at when your body is able to do and when you're overdoing it versus when you're under doing it.

Right?

And until you test, and that's one thing I love about you and your tribe, it is test, don't guess it is not. Just let me just go do it. And I think everyone, my neighbor told me, take this basil, it's going to be good for you. Well, I'm going to test it. Does it work for me or it doesn't work for me? And what we're saying is instead of doing the trial and error, we have actually now built the AI so we can analyze your body so we can tell you hey, it's not going to work for you. And here is why we don't simply say don't do it. We tell you why. So if we see a lot of ammonia being produced in your gut, we know that ammonia actually can see the pathways that are active protein fermentation pathways. We say, oh, that means your protein is not getting digested by your upper intestine. You should take digestive enzyme with that, like it's not that heavy.

There's two groups that who need to hear what you just said again. One is carnivores and the other is bodybuilders, right? So anyone who's gone to a gym full like the real big guys like you don't want to breathe the air in that gym because they're all making huge amounts of ammonia in their guts. And reducing ammonia protects your kidneys and it's profoundly anti aging. And some of the amino acids like ornithine that I recommend are specifically there to drop the levels of ammonia in the body. But you just don't know if you've got that going on. And the enzyme thing or hydrochloric acid we talked about earlier with sterilizing the bacteria from your mouth, that also is tied in. And the thing that I like about this, yes, I've spent, geez, I don't know, 100 plus thousand dollars on lab tests over the years. Probably because I'm curious, partly because I was super sick and I would spend everything I had to get my energy to where it is now. But you're adding biological age, stress response, cell health, immune health, mitochondrial health, and gut bacteria. And it's 200 bucks. And then people get $20 off. So was it code Dave or codaspee? I already forgot the code on Biome. It's. What is it?

I think it's code Dave.

Yeah, yeah, there you go. So it's 180 bucks. But it's probably the most cost effective test that I've seen. And what I like about your business model is that you sell the test for exactly what it costs to run the test. And the cost has dropped from like 400 bucks when you launch at the conference years ago down to less than half of that. But the amount of data that comes out of it is probably 10 times more data.

In fact, the test we launched four years ago was only the gut intelligence test at that time for 499. Now that thing is, by the way, $99 now.

So there you go, it's $99 for that test. So the costs have dropped a lot. And when people are saying, where do I get started with testing? I don't think there's a better value than this because it gives you a lot of data. And you could say, oh, it's working pretty well, or I didn't know I had that problem. And.

But Dave, and one more thing we did, which is really groundbreaking and I think no one, I'm surprised no one has ever done that is now once we analyze your body, we can tell you what nutrients your body needs. So for example, we don't say, hey, everyone takes vitamin D, vitamin C, all the stuff but multivitamin, everybody, we said, no, no, no, no. You need 22 milligram of elderberry every day. You need 27 milligram of berberine every day. You need 79 milligram of amylase every day. And we literally give you every vitamin, minerals, herbs, digestive enzymes, amino acids and guess what? All the probiotics, prebiotics and we literally make those capsules with only those ingredients that are good for you and with only in that dosage. There is no pre made capsule. It's not take one capsule from pink drawer, one from red drawer. We literally have these robotic machines, they say go to bin number 33, take 17 milligrams, go to bin numbers 13, takes 27 milligrams and literally take that powder, we mix it up and then we put them in a capsule and we ship it to you that day. That capsule is made for you that day. And literally every month when you do a test, whenever you do a retest, we make them again. So let every single month you get that thing made for you on demand every single month. And we are going to do something even better. Now this is something we haven't announced yet, but you're always a friend so you get to hear it first. We are now launching the next things. Remember we do the RNA testing. So we literally looking at every transcript that's happening in your body, your new human host and your microbiome and the human host in your saliva and microbial interactions in the human host and microbial activities in saliva, stool and blood. Last thing we're launching is the proteomics. Even though you would argue that transcripts should be able to give you the amino acid that tells you what protein is going to be produced. But a lot of some of the proteins are not made, they're not in the blood, they're not made by the blood transcript, for example crp. So what we're doing now is to actually have a proteomics in a blood card. You actually put the touch, couple of drops of blood in the blood card and now we are running a complete proteomics and it's going to be a complete game changer. Measuring DNF alpha crp. We're going to be measuring things like LBP by the way, the only guaranteed way of knowing you have a leaky gut lipopolysaccharide binding protein. Yes, lbp. We are doing the things for the Hashimoto disease and we are measuring all the, of course all the cytokines that we can get from transcription. But in the proteomics we're going to also do all the antibodies for different foods. So we are able to do that. And by the way, here's the thing we figured out. Instead of one Antibody for each protein per val. That how it used to be done. We can do 96 protein into one cell. That means my cost of doing is going to come down to equivalent of about 10 cents.

Wow. So this is a big tech data play and you also have data like hundreds of thousands of people, 325,000 people.

As of last year and growing about 15 to 20,000amonth.

Wow. And what was that number again? How many of those? 325,325. Wow. It keeps growing every time we talk. And so it's now to the point where there's such a rich data set that you can go in and just get more and more value from the data that someone's already sent in this new test that you're turning on, especially with the food antibodies, I'm really interested is that currently available?

So it's going to be available, I would say in the next few months. But that is something. This next test we're launching is as I said, full body intelligence and this thing called immunoassays. So we're going to be launching this whole immunoassays right after that. So it's going to be full body intelligence and immunoassays and we're going to actually may just ship it out to everyone at no cost when they buy our supplements. And every month we measure what's changing because of supplements and we make the supplement next month based on that. What's changed?

So as your body changes so literally on a monthly. And what do you have to send in? Is that a blood sample or is that saliva or what?

Just a blood sample. Few drops of blood.

Wow. And the few drops of blood. These are really easy to do.

Now blood cards by the finger prick and blood card, just touch, touch, touch.

Very simple to do that. So this is groundbreaking. If I'd have had this 20 years ago, just what you have in the current test, not even the new test would have solved the vast majority of the things I was dealing with.

So next thing we're launching, Dave, that I think since we are giving you an update, is cancer detection. So as you know, just based on your saliva alone, we got the FDA breakthrough device designation to detect stage one oral cancer. Stage one throat cancer. Simply spit on a tube with 95% specificity and 90% plus sensitivity, we can tell you you have a cancer in your mouth or your throat or not. And by the way, that's going to be another couple of hundred dollars test. It's not like thousands of dollars you spend today. Even you know, companies like Grail that launch at cancer test, their sensitivity is 45%. That means there is 55% time they're wrong. So think about it, it's no better than tossing a coin.

They're almost like the government.

And so I but our government, if you're looking for approval rating that's in 30s. So I think.

They'Re better than the government. Okay, I hear you there.

But coming back to it now, we are actually going to be enhancing that test for just on a saliva alone to detect other cancer. So we actually currently working on a clinical research on colorectal cancer. And we are really hoping, David, this is going to be a big breakthrough. Dave here is colon polyps not only detect the colon cancer to detect something before they become cancerous. So we're going to be able to looking to detect colon polyps before they become cancerous. So you can remove them and never have a cancer. Breast cancer, pancreatic cancer. As you know, I lost my dad to pancreatic cancer. So it's important to me that we work on that. We are working on gynecological cancer, we are working on all the GI cancer, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, all the head, neck, shoulder cancers. Right. So that another thing we're doing is a large, very large research in two continents on pre Alzheimer mci, mild cognitive impairment. And we see extremely strong signals of MCI in your saliva. So we really think that from your saliva we'll be able to say hey, you are starting to get little bit of early Alzheimer's. Here are the things you need to do to protect yourself so you don't get there.

Are you working with Maria Shriver and her women's Alzheimer's movement?

No, no, no, I've not talked to her. I think you told me once up to talk to her.

Yeah, I'll connect you guys. I'm going to do a little bit of fundraising at the next biohacking conference. Awesome.

I'm going to be there. Maybe you should get her there.

Yeah, let's see. We invited her last one, this one's in la so she might be able to make it. That would be really cool. We're going to take another mutual friend, Max Lugaver. We're going to a auction him off as an eligible bachelor for a date and we're going to donate that to women's hospital.

If I were you, I would auction you off. I think you're looking younger and younger.

Well, I suppose we could do that. It'd be a heck of a date, though. So the idea, though, we have this world where Alzheimer's is about drugs and there's nothing you can do about it, and you have to break up these plaques and you're using data in like true biohacker fashion to just blow that out of the water and say we can see it so long before. And what excites me about talking with you every time is that you look at the world through your lens, right? And like, we can solve this. The data's right there, we've got algorithms already crunching through this and it's obvious. And then you go to a normal Alzheimer's doctor and like, well, there's nothing you can do but exactly have a service animal or a person, a caregiver. Do you think you'll be able to reverse it with this knowledge or just keep it from happening in the first place?

So think about that. What's happening, what causes these neurodegenerative diseases is not. I mean, fundamentally, what really, really makes me angry is we have been preached. You have these genetics and it's nothing you can do. It's bad luck. And that is such a bullshit because remember, if you have a gene that you're born with, I don't care what that gene is, right? Why would that gene sit there for 60, 70 years and say, you know what? I'm sick and tired of waiting. I'm going to wipe out Dave's memory tomorrow. Really. My point is something has to trigger that gene to over express or under express before it does something, right? So my point is, if you take the trigger away, does it really matter what genes you have? And that's the problem part. I just keep saying that. Don't blame that. You're destined to get it and I have nothing I can do. It's a bad luck. The answer is you can do something about it. So here is what I see happening. That amyloid, Amyloid beta is a protective agent, that is the glial cells are releasing to protect itself from the infection that they're getting when you have a permeability in the blood brain barrier. So once the organisms are getting into the brain, the gilial cells are releasing the amyloid beta to protect themselves. If you remove them, you have not removed the cause because the infection is still there. So my point is all these drugs, they're simply trying to suppress the symptom, not the root cause. And that is a fundamental problem. All these people have autoimmune disease. Let's suppress your immune system. Would you like to figure out why the immune system is acting that way.

That's been my whole path, because I know I have autoimmunity since I was a little kid. Right. And valence helped a lot. It does. I think there's some things I still don't know, but we're going to get there. Right. And that's the iterative process.

And that's my point, is this idea of, you know, it's just a bad luck. And I'm telling you, it's a matter of bad choices, not the bad luck that causes us to have these diseases. So I really believe that not only we'll be able to prevent, but to be able to, in fact, first of all, stop the progression and then also to be able to reverse it, but we should be able to prevent it and stop the progression of it for sure. And then we want to be able to say, okay, now that we sealed the blood brain barrier, we got rid of all that, now let's get rid of the infection where it is there so we can actually get rid of the cause and reverse the disease diseases. And that's the reason I believe many of these diseases are fundamentally turning out to be inflammatory diseases, including aging. By the way, the number one thing that we see in the people who are aging in every decade is the higher and higher cytokines in their body. That constant inflammation is what's causing people to age. Because when you have a constant inflammation, it is constantly destroying your organs. It's destroying every part of your body. That infection and inflation, inflammation.

You know, we just had another podcast where we talked a lot about IL6, Interleukin 6, which is one that goes crazy with certain kinds of viral infections, including the most popular ones, but many other ones as well.

IL8, by the way, we are seeing IL8 really, really high in people who have essentially biological ages higher. We are seeing a lot of other interleukins that are playing a key part. And a lot of the viruses that you. CMV is another one that actually seems to be turning out to be one of the key virus.

CMV is definitely a big thing. And also EBV gets turned on.

Yes, absolutely.

So the Epstein Barr virus. And so there's this weird interaction between viruses that we think don't matter but are causing all sorts of aging. And then you get. The other thing that you're the first person who made me aware of this is that plant viruses are messing us up. Talk to me about plant viruses and aging and human health.

Oh, my gosh. So very interesting case is that Lot of the phages. So I think I'm gonna talk about two things that no one wants to ever talk about. One is the phages. And by the way, Dave, you are probably one of the few people I've ever talked about phages. And you don't laugh at me because you said Russia is so important.

The Russians know, of course we can't say anything from Russia is good right now. But the Russians research on phages change the world.

I mean, in fact, a lot of Eastern European countries, I mean Hungary and every. I mean they have really large research on phages. So I really, what we happening is lot of these viruses, including the plant viruses, are RNA viruses. So think about it. So when you do the metagenomics, you do all the DNA testing, you never see them because they are RNA viruses. And the only time you get to see them is when you're doing the meta transcriptomics. And we are the only company in the world that has been doing it at scale, right? So that's how we started to see these plant viruses. And what we see is these plant viruses have an ability to actually get past our gut lining because the viruses can travel where the bacteria couldn't. So now we are starting to see these viruses were actually showing up in the blood even when the people where the gut lining was not permeable. So I think what we starting to see is a lot of these plant viruses are just as bad, including there are 10 times more phages in our gut than the bacteria. And by the way, nature is the same. I think in the nature, when you look at, for every single bacteria, there are probably 10 or 100 more phages out there. So phages are all over us. It's not some anomalies out there. This is, we live in their world, they don't live in our world. Let's be very clear.

So well said. And it's really neat when you get to foundational stuff in biology. These are very small molecules. They're very small, even if you can call them organisms, not quite alive. But they're basically things that are infecting or affecting bacteria, right? And then we know bacteria affect us. So too, the stuff that's messing with bacteria that mess with us or help us, they seem like they might be kind of important in a system like that, but it's largely overlooked. And so the fact that you can measure them means we can pay attention to it. And this brings me back to the conversation about cholesterol. It was easy to measure a long time ago. So we have kabillions of dollars of research saying, well we could measure this, therefore it must be in charge of all these other things. It's not in charge of.

Oh my God.

And what you're saying, well now we can measure this stuff. Let's actually use big data, which you couldn't use in 1945 when they're looking at cholesterol and see what's actually changing things. So let me ask you this. Should I be sterilizing any vegetable by cooking it before I eat it? Because if I eat a raw vegetable, I'm going to get phages all over the place.

Actually, I really believe the raw vegetables are including eating some of the dirt that comes with the raw vegetables is actually good as long as damn thing is not grown in pesticides. And if it's organically grown in your own garden, I would literally pull the carrot out, shake it up and eat it as is. Because you want the soil microbiome going into, you want to enrich your microbiome.

Important asterisk to that. If you made the mistake even one time of putting well marketed sewage sludge in your garden in the US do not do that, it could kill you. There's a whole documentary that's, that's largely censored by the health ranger who's mostly taken offline because of some stuff he's doing. But literally there's 56 kinds of E. Coli and only one is compatible with you. And in the US they are selling sewage slug sewage sludge with all 56 kinds of E. Coli in it. Not sterilized, not heated the way it has to be in Europe. You put it in your garden and then you eat a carrot with that on it.

If it's grown and you're growing it and you're putting right, real organic stuff, I think it's good soil, right? Yeah, good soil.

Are you hopeful that we're going to have prescription phages? There was a move towards that in the 80s and 90s in Eastern Europe.

I believe, especially for infectious diseases instead of taking antibiotics. I think they're going to be specific phages for specific bacteria that you'll be able to actually kill that only. So if you have strep, you only want to kill that streptococcus, you don't want to kill everything else. So yes, they're going to be phages and I really believe now these crispr phages that are actually designed to actually kill only one and only when something is misbehaving. So remember, the bacteria can be good for you or it can be bad for you depending on its behavior. So Akkermansia can be probiotic and Akkermansia can cause multiple cirrhosis. C. Diff can produce butyrate. C. Diff can kill you. So my point is you want to measure not what organisms are there in your gut, you want to measure what they are actually doing. Same thing in your oral microbiome. And now using crispr phages, you can only attach when there is a certain function that is being actually performed by these organisms and that is fundamentally changes everything.

So you want to crispr the phages and make really custom engineered ones. Wow. I am in support of doing that. Although I'm a little concerned they might replicate and do bad things on the planet. Are you worried about that?

So the only thing about them is that since they only impact very specific bacteria, they can't really run wild. Right. Because the phages are very designed to actually find only that bacteria. Right. With those functions.

So if bacteria are sheep, phages are kind of the sheepdogs that are pushing them around. So having a bioengineered phage that makes your bacteria behave. So the C. Diff is the good C Diff, not the bad C. Diff. It's actually not. There is no good C. Diff. There's good Clostridium, but the Difficile is always bad, as far as I know it is.

It is actually can be commensal. It doesn't have to be bad in a sense. Most of us actually have a C. Diff, but as long as we have enough good environment around it, it keeps the C. Diff in check and it actually becomes C. Diff is good for you in some sense because a slight inflammatory activity keeps your immune system actually primed. So it is good to have a primed up immune system that's always ready to attack. Right. Versus immune system that is absolutely not primed. So actually having a good environment around C. Diff actually is good. C Diff can be good.

I've got to ask about parasites. I once took some rat tapeworm egg larva, larva eggs on stage at the biohacking conference. Because there are some and these are, are like rat tapeworms, what these can't live, the larvae can't live in the human body for more than six weeks. And what it was to do is to stimulate the immune system and to help heal the gut. It's a broader class of things called Helman therapy. But I know there's huge numbers of people walking around with giardia with other Parasites in their gut, amoebas and things. And are you detecting those? Are you like, what's your take on maybe even using those beneficially?

So we actually see everything. As long as an organism is alive, we see it. So whether it is a bacteria, virus, fungus, mold, it doesn't matter, we see everything. If it is producing a transcript, we see every transcript. We do a completely unbiased transcriptomics. That means if there is a transcript, we are seeing it. Right. So we literally look for everything, whether it's a phages, whether it's any euclide, we see everything that's out there. And then we actually run a whole bunch of machine learning to see what's happening with the people when they have this disease. And that's how we are able to build a predictive model to say, hey, when this is happening, you have this disease, or this is people who have a disease, this is where you are. And every time you do a retest, we can tell you are you moving towards a disease or are you moving away? It's not static. It's not like you have six times higher likelihood of getting Alzheimer's. Enjoy your life. We can tell you here are the things what you can do.

I mean, I know which genetic test you're talking about there, those ones drive me crazy. And six times your risk, which was 1%, is still a very small risk. And maybe you don't need to lose your mind right now.

And by the way, first of all, it's not Even true like Apoe4 where they claim to have GWAS, which is genomic wide association study, which is finding the pattern in the noise lot of the people they saw in Amazonian tribe. By the way, they had eight copies of Apoe 4 Never Get Alzheimer. They in fact turned out Apoe 4 was protecting them from the infections of the when they were getting bitten by the mosquitoes, right? So here it is. Elephant has by the way, more copies of APO4 than anyone. And guess what elephants are known for memory. They never lose their memory. Memory of an elephant.

Wow, that's interesting. I've often thought that all of these things, including the people who have autoimmunity like I do, the HLA Dr. Four people were designed to basically survive a famine and to invade some other country and take their food and eat it, even if it's not familiar to us. So rapid acting clotting and rapid acting immune systems are a survival advantage in an apocalyptic world, but in this world they kind of suck, right? So it's getting to be more Programmable with changing small things in your gut using the data from violence.

HLA typing simply, you know, HLE is how it reacts to the external environment. So if your HLA typing is there, then all you have to do is adjust the microbial activities in your body and then actually it can be compatible with your HLA rather than actually that, you know, those microbial activity that are incompatible with your HLA typing.

Well, there's microbial interactions with HLA that don't worry me as much. But people with differences in their SNPs there usually have mold problems. And we know now, and I'm saying this since I started my blog, the fungal biome is a massive thing and it's called microbiome.

Microbiome?

Yeah, the micro, not microbiome. Yeah, NYC O fungus. So talk to me about the mycobiome. What's going on with fungus in our.

Guts, by the way. So again, you know, fungus is, as I said, it's like any other species. It can be commensal and it can be absolutely parasitic, right? In general, fungus is just a bad thing, right? But you know, it's not that. If it is a tiny bit of fungus, you need to go out and say, God, I need to flush this, my body out and get a new body. In a sense that if you have an environment, remember it's part of the ecosystem. So don't focus as much on individual thing as focus on this whole ecosystem, right? This ecosystem actually balances itself out as long as you create a good environment. When the environment is toxic, guess what happened? Even the good organisms start to release toxic stuff to protect themselves from the other toxicity, right? So when you see that you are in an in a gut environment which is highly high flagellar activity, high lps, lot of toxins, every organism wants to protect itself. What does it do? It releases more toxins to kill those guys. And by the way, we as humans are simply a collateral damage to that problem, right? But guess what? If you have these fungus and you have it in the within the go good ecosystem, it will keep everything in check as long as it's in a smaller quantity. When it gets to be into a quantity which is larger, then the whole ecosystem falls apart.

I think that's reasonable. One of the examples of that is if you're in a house that has toxic mold in your sinuses and in the back of your throat, your streptococcus bacteria will shift to protect themselves from the antibiotics that are made by these funguses. Because we all know the fungus is where it comes from. Right. Mold makes penicillin, for instance, and then you get a much higher risk of strep throat because you have more aggressive bacteria that then make lipopolysaccharides in your sinuses right next to your brain, which cause brain inflammation. So we have some control of our environment. But you don't know if you're eating at a moldy restaurant and if you're sensitive, it'll actually cause these bacterial shifts. Is there something that you're learning with viome about how to turn that off? I mean, are we going to be doing probiotic nasal sprays? What's the future look like?

I mean, I think ultimately in my opinion there has to be a very specific targeted thing for each, each of these cases. I think they're not going to be. Is one silver bullet for every, you know, for everyone. So we have to look at this stuff and see, okay, what are, what are the organisms there? What are the specific mold and fungus in there and how do we attack that specifically that target rather than do something that actually would destroy everything else around you. So you want to keep the ecosystem as much intact as possible and only get rid of the bad actors.

Got it. So there's. There's more work to be done there, I think. And we may end up with.

It is very early, very early stage. Dave, that part I would be lying if I see that's coming out in the next six months. This is a problem that's going to get solved. What's good thing is data and machine learning is going to solve this problem. They just know two ways about it. Whether it happens in two years from now or it takes five years from now, it is going to happen within a decade. I can guarantee you we as humanity will get rid of cancer. Because there's just no doubt in my mind we're starting to understand what causes the onset of a cancer and the progression of the cancer. And this thing is going to happen. We are going to be able to prevent and stop cancer from happening in the human body, period, in the next decade. And same thing for autoimmune diseases. Same thing for many of these metabolic diseases. Now imagine. I mean, it's not. There is no reason any one of us need to actually have a diabetes. I mean, think about it. It's not. Diabetes is not something you develop overnight. It happens eight, 10 years where you have high insulin. High insulin leads to high glucose. When the insulin cannot get rid of enough glucose, then you get the HBA1C to go up. So this is a long term problem that you can stop at any stage before you can develop a diabetes, obesity. And you and I both know it's not that obesity somehow is in our DNA. Oh, we are, you are going to get obese. It may be you're predisposed to it, but you still have control over it. It's not like you have to happen. We, I mean I've lost £20 and Dave, you lost plenty of. I mean now you're developing muscles, so it's not. You have to lose weight, but you're getting rid of the damn fat and you turn converting them into muscles.

Right, right, right. What have you seen in terms of gut bacteria and muscle growth in people?

You know, there's not, we have not done a lot of research on that to be truthful here, that there is not a lot of research we have done on muscle growth and gut bacteria. But they just know two ways that in some sense think about what's happening. Your microbes are. 99% of all the genes that are expressed in the human body are coming from our microbes. They're not our human genes. Right. These metabolites, or call them a microbiome poop. The micro poop is what we call metabolites in technical words, they get absorbed in our human body, human host. And our human host gene expression is constantly changing. In fact, we have now shown that as microbial activities are changing, what human gene expressions are changing. So now you know, if you want to control the human gene expression, what microbes, microbial activity, you have to control it. So you can see these human host gene expression that control the muscle building activities. What are the microbial features that are directly connected to that? And by changing the foods you take, you can actually control for the myostatin. Right. To be able to actually control the myostatin that builds the muscle growth.

So it does come down to myostatin, which is a thing that we've been trying to manipulate in the bodybuilding community forever, which is to trigger muscle growth independently of a compound called mtor, which is something. And also independent of insulin. So if you're trying to put on muscle, get insulin or insulin like growth factor up, get MTOR up and potentially inhibit myostatin and then watch yourself turn into a balloon animal overnight. So we don't have that solved yet, but I think we're moving in that direction. So you can turn that signal on real quickly and maybe just for a couple days and put on enough muscle that it lasts for a couple of weeks. But you can have those things low the rest of the time. Which is probably the right thing to do.

I can't believe that David, just been an hour and we basically have barely scratch the surface.

I know, right? Naveen, I just want to say thanks for the massive amounts of knowledge about human biology that you're adding to the even the world of research right now. I mean cancer detection, who would have imagined, you know, five or however many years it's been since you started. It's been more than five, six years. Six years that it would have led from hey, let's look at just your basically your gut bacteria into this incredible rapid expanding world of mitochondrial health and all. And the fact that it's under $200 to do all this testing now. It's also very disruptive. And so guys, Naveen is brilliant. His research team is actually more brilliant but maybe less curious. There's some very smart people on the team I've had a chance to interact with. And what I would recommend is if you're looking to do a lab test, Viome is very, very affordable and it's very, very rich data that's actionable and you can save 20 bucks. Use code Dave. So it's worth your time and Naveen's the real deal if there ever was such a thing. So I highly recommend it. Oh, and Naveen, Paris Hilton says hi. I was just on her show earlier today and she. We actually mentioned you on the show because she's a big fan as well.

She is. She has been just great supporter. And by the way she has been taking Viome supplements and she tells me that she has more energy now than she ever thought she would. So it's really, really helping a lot. So I mean I really tell you that. Do the test but remember, eat the foods that are actually good for you. Avoid the food that are bad for you and take your supplements. They are actually needed. It's not some bullshit that these guys are selling. Supplement. We don't make any supplement with a nutrient that your body doesn't need. We make the custom made for. For you. The every single ingredient there is designed for you in the doses that you need. So to me that's just a game changer is if you're going to, if you care about your body, go take care of it. Because if you take care of it, it will take care of you when you need it.

It's. It's totally true. Naveen, thank you again and I look forward to having you back on the show whenever you've cracked another code. Of being human. Have an awesome day.

Thanks a lot, Dave.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.