Digital Social Hour
Guruduth Banavar : Why Your DNA Doesn’t Decide Your Health | DSH #1702
23 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: Why is RNA more important than DNA for health?
There's no such thing as a single healthy microbiome. There's many different ways of being healthy. Yeah. And I would say that, you know, people with very few pathways that are out of whack would be in the generally healthy category, and that's definitely less than about 5%. All bacteria are not bad guys.
Yeah.
Most of the time, bacteria tend to be good guys, but sometimes they express the bad genes depending on the environment they're found in. So environmental factors are the majority of the contributors to chronic disease at the end of the day, and those are in your control. The people who have the lowest biological age relative to their chronological age are vegetarians.
There's no such thing as a universally healthy food. Yeah. No superfoods or anything?
Nothing, nothing.
Wow.
Okay, guys, founding CTO of Viome at the AI4 conference here with Guru. He's speaking in a couple hours. Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you so much, Sean. Yeah, what do you plan on speaking about today?
Well, I'm going to be speaking about RNA, microbiome, and AI, how those three things come together to support prevention of chronic disease and also maintaining and improving your health span.
Right. So the microbiome is really important.
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Chapter 2: How does the microbiome influence chronic diseases?
And that's really, really important.
Interesting. Yeah. Tell us more about RNA. I don't know much about it.
So everybody knows about DNA, right? And DNA is sort of the basic blueprint for your biology. But DNA is a very static molecule. You know, you're born with it, you die with it. RNA is changing all the time. RNA is the expression of your DNA, right? So if you have, as a human, you have approximately 22,000 genes.
So now you think about approximately 5% of those 22,000 genes being expressed at any given point in time, depending on what you're doing right now, you know, what you ate, how you slept, whether you're stressed or not. So that 5%, which 5% of your entire human genome is being expressed at a given point in time, that is super important.
And if the wrong things are expressed, then you end up having chronic disease of different types. So RNA is basically the dynamics of your biology. DNA is kind of like the static blueprint from which the RNA is derived. And it's the same thing for your microbiome. So when I think about microbiome, like think about a bacteria, right? A bacteria approximately has about 3,000 genes.
Again, 5% or less of the 3,000 genes are expressed. And you know what? All bacteria are not bad guys. Most of the time, bacteria tend to be good guys, but sometimes they express the bad genes depending on the environment they're found in. So it's much more important for us to measure and analyze RNA than DNA.
Okay.
So when we realized this in Viome and we made the bet that RNA is going to be more important, that was back in 2016, 2017. Yeah. We were way ahead of everybody else. There's really nobody in the industry who measures RNA right now. Definitely not in our industry. Still right now? Even now. Wow. Even now. We are the only company that measures RNA.
Everybody does DNA or they do something called metagenomics, which is to look at the DNA of microbes. Right? So that will only give you a very static view of what is going on. It doesn't say what is actually active. Wow. It only tells you who's there. It doesn't say what they're doing. They may be doing something great.
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Chapter 3: What is the connection between oral health and overall well-being?
They may be doing something really terrible. You don't know the difference if you're just looking at DNA. That's why RNA is super important. And then you look at not just the human RNA, but you also look at the microbial RNA, and you combine the two.
Interesting.
And the way you do that is through AI. AI is so important here because the amount of data that you can get from any sample, like in biome, we get three samples typically for our full body intelligence, which is your stool sample, your blood sample, and your saliva sample, right?
With those three samples, you can get a tremendous amount of the RNA molecules, meaning the expressed genes in your gut, in your mouth, in your blood. So in your gut and your mouth, it's a majority of your microbiome RNA molecules that we get. But in your blood, it's your human RNA that we get.
So we connect all those dots, and the amount of data we get from a given individual is like millions and millions. It's like literally tens of millions of data points for a given individual. Wow. And then we select a few of them and combine the dots and create these pathways. And we measure something like 10,000 very important data points for a given individual, right?
I mean, you talk about companies that are out there who say they have 100 biomarkers, 150 biomarkers, whatever. They're fighting in the hundreds, right? We have 10,000 biomarkers that are critical for a given individual. from your stool, from your blood, from your saliva. We combine all of those things, and the only way you can do that is through AI. Wow.
So that's what I've been doing for the last eight years, building up the basic infrastructure, the bioinformatics, the pathway analysis, the biomarker discovery, the recommendation engines, all of those things that are required to understand the RNA and the microbiome through AI. So I'm going to put all that stuff together and talk about it in a couple of hours.
That is fascinating. I can't believe there's that many biomarkers. 10,000? 10,000 key ones.
I'm talking about measuring literally tens of millions of biomarkers in your raw sample, right? So we measure all of those things and we connect the dots and we build pathways. And those pathways are based on the 10,000 key biomarkers. Nice.
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Chapter 4: What does biological age mean and how can it be improved?
Before a person has a heart attack, There is probably like five years before there are markers in your blood, in your microbiome, in your oral cavity and so forth. So what we do in Viome is to try to detect those very, very early markers so we can give you the advance warning. We give you early warning and say, hey, look, your pathway for TMA production is not doing great. in your gut, right?
TMA production can get converted into TMAO when it translocates into your bloodstream, and that can create plaque, it can create atherosclerosis, it can create cardiovascular disease, heart attack at the end, right? So we can detect when your TMA pathways are not optimal or suboptimal, And we can tell you upfront, hey, look, there's something going on with your TMA pathways.
You need to do something differently. And here are our recommendations of what you can do differently. And it's all boiling down to your nutritional regimen, your regular foods that you eat. You know, some people can eat a lot of red meat and their TMA pathways are great. Some people eat red meat and their TMA pathways go haywire. So we can detect where your TMA pathways are.
And then we can say, hey, look, do more of this, do less of this. And then you're going to change the pathways. And that will give you an early warning for all the chronic disease that we care about.
That's interesting because a lot of people recommend certain diets, but it could be more complicated than that.
Oh, you know, the critical thing that we've discovered is that there's no such thing as a universally healthy food. Yeah. No superfoods or anything? Nothing. Nothing. You know, I'll give you an example, right? I take this test every year or so. Sometimes I do it every nine months. But the last time I did the test, which was in May of this year, it came back and said I should not eat turmeric.
Wow. Turmeric, which everybody thinks is a superfood, right? Curcumin, it's anti-inflammatory. They say, hey, have turmeric. You get it in all the coffee shops and all the smoothie shops that you go to and so on. Guess what? For me, it's not a good food. And the reason is, given my Indian heritage, right, I use a lot of turmeric in my cooking. I've probably overdone it. Wow.
And my bilacets and my secondary bilacets, right, they're all haywire. So now I need to slow down on that. I need to say, hey, listen, I should not be eating too much turmeric.
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Chapter 5: Are superfoods a myth in the context of nutrition?
And I've actually started doing that. The last couple of months, I've been slowing it down. On the other end of the spectrum, my Viome test came back and said, I need to eat a lot more mushrooms. You know, it's a good thing for me to eat mushrooms because it's going to improve my bile acid metabolism.
And so, you know, I'm not a big fan of mushrooms, but I have I have been looking for mushrooms now. I go to restaurants. I look for mushroom dishes. I go to a grocery store. I look to buy mushrooms and I'm eating a lot more mushrooms now. So, yeah, I mean, I change my my lifestyle based on my volume results and. In many cases over the last few years, I've seen results.
Like example is, you know, my oral health has been not very good, especially during COVID. I did not go to the dentist for a year and a half, two years. Didn't want to, you know, take the risk. But, you know, when I saw my dentist in 2023, they said it was in not very good shape. I had, you know, gum inflammation. I had like the early signs of periodontitis.
For the last two years now, I've been taking Viome's,
toothpaste and oral lozenges very seriously and i've been having that every single day as much as i can and in the last one year my dentist like what did you do it's like how did you change your you know your your whole oral environment so dramatically in the last one year so everything has changed now and and i have a really good you know oral dental gum health and everything else so that's
Those are the kinds of examples where I've literally changed my lifestyle, and it makes a difference. Wow.
Yeah, I think we're now realizing how important oral health is recently, right?
Yeah, oral health, you know, people have, you know, ignored it, and it turns out there's a lot of connection between your oral health and your cardiovascular health, your brain health, and so forth. So there's this bug, you know, bacteria called Porphyromycin gingivalis, which is in most people's mouths, okay? It just lives there, just, you know, normal.
But for some people, the performance gingivalis starts to express a particular toxin called ginger pain. And if that ginger pain translocates from your oral cavity into your blood because you have bleeding gums or something like that, that can actually create a lot of havoc. It can create cardiovascular problems. It can create brain problems.
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Chapter 6: How does AI analyze biomarkers for personalized health?
But I will tell you for sure that there is a lot of connection between your gut health, your oral health, your cardiovascular health, your brain health, right? So those connections are definitely there, whether it's a single tooth or whether it's your whole... Cavity, it's difficult to tell with our science.
What our science says is that when you get saliva from an individual, we can measure the activity of these pathways. And we can see whether that's impacting your heart health, your brain health, and so forth. And we see that you can improve your heart health and brain health once you detect what's going on in your mouth.
What's your science saying about microplastics?
Well, microplastics are still a new area and we haven't dug that deep into it, to be honest with you. But, you know, there's so the first thing we do in our science is to measure all the expressed genes. Right. So what we would have to do soon is to to measure the impact of microplastics on the expressed genes, which we plan to do in the short in a short while.
And we'll publish that data as well.
That's needed. A lot of concern with it. I would agree with you. Yes, we need to do that. They're finding it in every organ right now. You bet. The heart, the brain, in the testicular region.
Yeah, toxins from the environment, right? Microplastics are one of the biggest things, but also pesticides, right? Right. Also fungi in your house, right? Yeah, mold. There can be lots of things in your, yeah, mold, exactly, in your household. And all of these toxins, environmental toxins, are impacting your microbiome.
and your microbiome is impacting your overall health, which impacts your chronic disease status, right? That's the science that we're building step by step. Hey, this might be a good time to say that we have, in Viome, collected more than a million samples now. Wow. And that is from about a half a million individuals from more than 100 countries around the world.
So we are getting data from everywhere, from all different demographics, all different geographies, all different disease types and so forth. So the phenotype data, meaning the disease symptoms, the lifestyle, the medications that people take, all of that information is in the
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Chapter 7: What role does the environment play in chronic disease?
right? From nature, right? By the way, your microbiome also comes from your mom more than anyone else.
So the mother's health is really important.
The mother's health is really important because your microbiome gets transferred. You know, when you have a vaginal birth, your mother's microbiome gets transferred to you and then it's up to you how you maintain it, right? Depends on how you build your lifestyle and what have you, right? So the question is, what fraction of the people have bad pathways and what do they do about it?
Yeah, I guess.
So what we end up seeing is, you know, the work that you did to maintain your pathways may be... Good for a small population, but it's generally speaking, a lot of pathways are out of whack. So what we see is the out of whack pathways comes from what you've been eating. Got it. Right? Because whatever you eat has the substrates for basically feeding the bacteria, right?
Your bacteria are eating what you eat and then producing the outputs, which are then absorbed by your intestinal lining. Yep. So your question is, you know, how much of it is genetic? How much of it is toxins? I would say it's a majority of it is coming from your environment, right? Your environment to me means it is what you eat, what you breathe.
how you manage your stress, your sleep and your activity. All of that is the majority of what we see in our pathways because that's what determines what gets expressed and therefore what pathways are doing well and what not doing well. So the thing about chronic disease is that you go to blue zones, right? Their environments are so good that they generally tend to have very few chronic diseases.
They tend to live very long. But you go to the developed world, you tend to have a huge prevalence of chronic diseases, metabolic disease, neurological disease, cardiovascular disease, all these diseases, and they also tend to have out-of-vac pathways. So overall, my answer to your question is it's mostly your environment, not so much your genetics. That's exciting, right, for a lot of people.
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, the really interesting point to me is that you can change your environment, right? You can do the things that will help you first improve your... your nutrition, and maybe you can do things to change your toxins in the environment as well. You can get rid of mold, for example. You can move to places where there's fewer microtoxins in the environment, right?
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Chapter 8: How can dietary choices impact biological age?
consumer in the world can buy Viome by going to Viome.com. So get our premier test. It's called Full Body Intelligence. It will take three samples from you, stool, blood, and saliva, and it gives you a ton of insights. It gives you a ton of recommendations. And based on that, you can either follow the food recommendations or you can take supplements and you can take biotics.
You can take toothpaste. You can take all kinds of lozenges, everything that's made for you. Yeah. Specifically. So it's customized for you based on what we discover from your samples, right? So that's for consumers. Now, people can go to, let's say, an entire wellness program in a company, right? You can have people take biome tests as a way to prevent chronic disease. That can improve.
We just did a pilot where we saw that people improved their productivity. People improved their happiness. People improved their gut health. Wow. Symptoms. People lost weight. They lost an average of about 10 to 12 pounds in a six-month period. Wow. Taking the Viome supplements, right? So the whole Viome program. So it's super, super cool.
And most recently, what we've done is we've created a pro version of the Viome full-body intelligence test. It's called Precision Health Pro, which can only be ordered by doctors. So if you prefer that you don't want to do it yourself at home, you want to get it through a doctor to go talk to your doctor and your doctor can implement it and they can order it for you.
And once they order it for you, they get a result on their side as well. They can interpret all the results. In fact, they get a lot more depth of data. Because they're trained, they can get better interpretation of things. You also get, as an individual patient or an individual who is looking to prevent chronic disease, you also get a lot of information on an app.
But your doctor gets a ton more information so they can interpret that for you and give you some suggestions for what you can do and what you need to do, right? So that's called Precision Health Pro. So that's a new product that we've just launched. And that is for healthcare providers to provide to their patients as well.
So that is a clinical-grade tool, whereas the other one is a consumer-grade tool that we can give to anyone and everybody in the world. And as I said before, people from more than 100 countries have taken it. You can take advantage of it. Everybody who's listening to this can take advantage of it. Go look at biome.com, look for Full Body Intelligence, and you'll get it.
I can't wait to try it. Thanks for your time today, man. Thank you so much, Tom. Check them out, guys. See you next time.
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