This Is The Root of All Chronic Disease | Naveen Jain on Health Theory

On today's episode of Health Theory with Naveen Jain, we cover the microbiome, how we're only 1% human, the fact that your DNA is not your destiny. We talk about his dad's cancer diagnosis, how we helped my wife Lisa restore her gut health, and how Viome is making chronic disease a choice. Welcome to Health Theory, everybody. Today's guest is Naveen Jain, a self-made billionaire who has dedicated his entire life to addressing the biggest issues in human health with his new company, Viome. In his own words, he wants to make illness a choice. So, my question, Naveen, is how on Earth do we make illness a choice? Well, most of our health we talk about really comes from these chronic diseases. And the chronic diseases are, whether it's a Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, when you look at depression, anxiety, or you look at OCD, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, cancer, or even all the autoimmune diseases. Every one of them is caused by one simple thing, which is a chronic inflammation. And the chronic inflammation happens because your gut microbiome is out of balance. As you know, the 70% of our immune system is along our gut lining. What we eat is what feeds the microbiome, and that actually trains our immune system. And when your microbiome is out of balance, your immune system is out of balance. And when your body is out of balance, it is at not at ease, and which is what we call disease. All right. So, let's back up and give people a quick breakdown of exactly what the microbiome is. Um, and the coolest example I've ever heard you use is talking about humans as a form of AI uh, that's basically meant to lug around the microbiome. Explain that. I thought that was really a pretty powerful insight. Yeah. So, actually, you know, you think about that and say, "How did humans actually got created?" And if you think from the perspective of the nature, As you know, uh, on on our spacecraft we call planet Earth, these uh single-cell organisms, the eukaryotes and the bacteria and viruses and the fungi and yeast and the mold, they've been around for billions of years. The humans are give or take about a couple of hundred thousand years old. So, you wonder, how did humans get created? So, here's my tongue-in-cheek story of how I believe it actually happened. One day, all these organisms got together. They were living in Africa. And they say, "You know, we're sick and tired of living in this a small space. We want to take over the world." And they all looked at each other. And one of the smarter ones said, "You know, I think I know what to do." What would you do? What if we can create something where trillions of us can live inside it? All we have to do is keep this thing healthy. It's going to walk around everywhere. We're going to make them crave what we want. They're going to find that food for us. They're going to go all over the world. They're going to poop everywhere. They're going to spread us around and we're going to take over the world. And they created human. And the humans, as the humans were evolving, suddenly they started to worry. As you know, we you and I now worry about artificial intelligence and we keep wondering, if this thing we just created called artificial intelligence, if someday it got smarter than us, what would happen to us? And these guys were no dumb. They start thinking about that. And so, one of the young one went to the master and said, "Master, master, we created this thing called humans. What if this thing got smarter than us, what will we do?" Master says, "Not to worry." "How so, master?" He says, "Right inside their cell, they call that mitochondria. You know, it's one of our brethren, right? It's one of the ancient bacteria. We talk to it all the time. This thing is the energy factory for their cell. They go out of control, we turn the energy off, they're done." They say, "Master, you're so brilliant." Until another younger one said, "Master, master, you're completely the point here. They're starting to develop this thing called brain. What are we going to do with that?" Master says not to worry. "Remember, most of us live inside the gut. We put a direct connection from the gut right to their brain. They call that a vagus nerve. And they they don't quite remember just because they call it a vagus nerve like Las Vegas, what happens in the gut doesn't stay in the gut. It goes everywhere. We in fact control what happens in their brain. And we let them know what we want through something they call neurotransmitters. So, you remember serotonin? Yeah, I remember serotonin. It makes them feel good. Yeah. Guess what? We produce 90% of the serotonin right in the gut. We don't let them produce it. They want to feel good, they got to feed us. And all this stuff, they control our amygdala through their microRNA interference. They control our prefrontal cortex. So, our decision-making, our behavior, what we do, what we want is controlled by them. And you say, "Young ones, just remember, like a good leader, we make them think they're making a decision. We are the ones simply pulling the strings. So, just sit back, enjoy, and let them take care of us." What I love about that, it's really one of the first times I've heard somebody talk about the microbiome coming first, which obviously from an evolutionary standpoint it did. Um and you know, talking about how nature really co-opts. If something works here, then it's likely to work there. And I remember thinking one time why are all viruses bad? Like why are all of their symptoms negative? The runny nose, the fever. And then I realized They're not. We in fact I mean, if you think about us, we are a walking, talking ecosystem. So, if you think from a you know, a spiritual perspective or you think about from a larger universe perspective, we humans are part of this larger ecosystem we call environment. We as humans are environment in ourselves. The trillions of microorganism inside us, we are a ecosystem. And when our ecosystem gets damaged because we are feeding it the wrong thing, then our body essentially starts to suffer. And same thing when you start to impact our outside environment, our body starts to impact because we're part of this larger ecosystem. The thing that's most interesting is that it's only now that we are able to understand what is going on inside our body. It used to be a completely a black box. And people always felt for the time they always wanted to eat healthy. But the problem was no one knew what was healthy. And so you will come up with these fad diets. But you start to look at the paleo diet and you start to look at the ketogenic diet and the lectin diet and you know, every day there is a new fad diet. The fact is you and I share almost identical DNA. 99.9% of our DNA is identical. When it comes to our organism, our environment inside our body, less than 5% is the same. And that's the reason there's no such thing called inflammatory food or or a healthy food because a food that's healthy for you may not be healthy for someone else. In fact, the food that's healthy for you today may not be healthy for you in 3 months. And explain to people why exactly that is. Yeah, so first of all, if you think about that our bodies are extremely unique as I said. And our ecosystem inside the gut, so anytime you eat food, what's the first thing is being encountered? Is encountered by the microbiome. And depending on their ecosystem, they're able to metabolize that food and either produce the nutrients that your body needs or it can produce the toxins that actually hurt the body and inflame the body. So for example, is Most people will think spinach is healthy. It turns out the spinach is not healthy for me and the reason is is spinach has lot of oxalate. And if you don't have the oxalobacter in your gut, it actually not going to be meta- oxalate cannot be metabolized by the gut microbiome. That means it's now being fed by someone else who is going to cut create a lipopolysaccharides, which is LPS, which is going to cause inflammation in your body. So, it turns out that as we have gone through now tens of thousands of people in our things, we find 30% of the people in our uh system today uh in fact is spinach is harmful to them. Wow, I'm surprised by that. Yeah, and more than interesting thing is 50% of the people that we see that think of polyphenol, everybody thinks a pomegranate juice is good for them or the walnuts are good for them or you know, the blueberries are good for them. All of these are really good for about half the people. Other half, you're simply wasting your money. It does nothing other than stressing and harming your body because you do not have the right organisms to be able to digest them. So, unlike everyone else in this field that has come before us, nobody has been able to see what these microbes are actually doing. They're only focused on who they were. And interesting thing is like us us humans you mean what they're only focused on who they were? Yeah, so in a sense that that two ways of looking at the things like who who are these organisms? What are their names? Are their name Paul and Tom and John? And you know it's Paul, Tom, and John, but is Paul the plumber? Is Paul the entrepreneur? Is Paul the electrician? Or what is Paul actually doing? So, knowing who they are doesn't tell you anything until you know exactly the function they are performing. So, if you think about by knowing the organism, it simply tells you what they could do, but just like any one of us, we have a potential, but we could be doing completely different things. Depending on what else is around us. So if you talk you know if you are with me, you could be calm and quiet. You could be with Lisa, you could be partying. Right? So depending on who else is with you, you change your behavior. And simply based on what is being fed to you, you change your behavior. All right, we got to unpack this cuz this is so important for people to understand. So Joseph Campbell has a quote that I think is insanely powerful and is really a play here, which is if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And I feel like what you're bringing to the table and what I find so interesting about the tongue-in-cheek story is it it actually forces us to change the metaphor and think of us as a shell that's housing the microbiome and that the microbiome in the fun story like organizes, gets together, builds a structure. And while that may not be sort of mythologically true, it's it really gets you to start thinking about it in the right way. So okay, now you think of us as a shell and it gets that whole notion of we're less than 1% human. Just really fast explain that. So basically we have more foreign cells in our body than the human cell. When it comes to gene expression, our human DNA only expresses about 20,000 genes and the microbiome in our gut produces about 2 million to 20 million genes. So at best we are 1% human from a gene expression perspective or worse we are 0.01% human. Which is really crazy and most people do not understand that and and I wouldn't have understood it. We'll talk more about Lisa later. I certainly would not have understood that until seeing what she was going through and trying to figure that out and I had to change my metaphor. I had to think of the microbiome first. I had to start thinking about being an ecosystem. So all right, we've got this shell. It's expressing 1% roughly of the genes that are active in within that shell. But I think more than that I want to also talk about that 1%. And you know most people think of our DNA as or our destiny. Our genes are our destiny. It turns out that genes are really not your destiny. It is obviously your microbiome, but even within the genes, it is a gene expression that counts, not the genes in themselves. And here's what I mean by that. Every part of our body has identical DNA. So, our hair, our, you know, our skin, our lung, our, you know, our heart, everything has the same DNA, but they're completely different. It is the expression of the same DNA that causes the thing to be what they are. So, that means nature has put together something called epigenetically. That means you can control what genes are expressed, what genes are overexpressed or underexpressed. Now, imagine what happens. Our microbiome releases these things called metabolites, which are the small molecules. After they digest the food, they release these nutrients and metabolites that are absorbed in our blood as a reaction to what is digested? What is digested. Okay. And then these metabolites are absorbed in our blood, and guess what happens? They start to epigenetically start to control our gene expression, right? Dude, this is so important. And that is really the key is that they now can change the gene expression of what is going on inside the human body. Not only your immune system, whether it is underactive, overactive, and essentially or saying this is a friend or a foe, they're training the immune system, but more importantly, they're also changing your gene expression. So, for example, what they found was recently that the cancer is not only caused by the microbiome and influenced by microbiome. 2 weeks ago, they found that pancreatic cancer is actually is the microbes moving from the gut going to pancreas, shutting down the immune system in the pancreas, and let the cancer grow. And they actually found that if you're able to put the antimicrobial thing in the uh pancreas and use the immunotherapy, they shrank the uh pancreatic cancer by 50% in few weeks, right? They found the Mayo Clinic that did the research about 3-4 months ago. They said the breast cancer is caused by the microbiome. They looked at 1,600 breast cancer tissues and found the same microbiome. What's more important there is That all the people that had that shared a similar microbiome. similar microbiome. Very interesting in the in the in the cancer tumor. Mhm. But more important The cancer tumor has its own microbiome. So, cancer tumor had the microbiome. And here's more interesting part. The therapy for cancer, whether it works or it kills you, depends on your microbiome. So, the two research Your microbiome and the microbiome of the cancer. your microbiome. So, it's very interesting when you take a drug, whether it's a chemotherapy or it's immunotherapy. So, chemotherapy drug, whether it actually works or completely creates toxins, uh depends on your microbiome. That means Because the microbiome is metabolizing metabolizing these chemotherapy drugs and sometime it turns them into poison that is guaranteed to kill you. Other time it detoxifies it and it doesn't kill cancer or it actually amplifies and allows it to kill cancer. Right? Immunotherapy, the same way they found that certain microbes microbiome would make it 10x more impactful for immune system to attack the cancer or it actually doesn't. So, whether even not just the cancer is caused by a microbiome, whether the cancer treatment works or does not work, depends on your microbiome. They found the same thing with PTSD. They found that depression is obviously the inflammatory disease and when you fix your gut, I mean, even our customers Remember, we don't go out as Viome ever cure a disease. We fix the inflammation and we fix the balance in your gut. And some people will tell us that, "Hey, I had depression, it's gone. I had anxiety, it is gone. I had acne, it is gone." And there were two women who went on Dr. Oz Show and one of them lost 71 lbs. We were not trying to help her help her lose weight. We simply she had inflammation and fixed inflammation. People have autoimmune diseases, IBD, IBS, and you go through these diseases, which are simply the names we give to certain set of symptoms. The fact is all of these diseases are fundamentally chronic inflammation that can be controlled through your diet, right? So, the trick really is not saying what is a healthy food, you need to say it's not about the food, it's about me, what's healthy for me, not what's a healthy food. Because like Hippocrates said, right? All diseases begin in the gut. One man's food is another man's poison. So, spinach could be good for you, it could be toxin for you. And then he said, let food be thy medicine, let thy medicine be the food. And we've forgotten that. That was 2,500 years ago, right? Yeah, dude, so crazy. So, I want to really tie off this change in metaphor that I think that you're bringing, which is so important. And if we can get everybody to make this switch and really start thinking about it, then I think they're going to understand better why it's so important what they eat, totally giving you that it's different for everybody and it depends on the current state of your microbiome, not even just that a snapshot lasts forever, that it's like very dynamic, and what you're eating influences your microbiome and all that. And we'll get into that. But so, you were saying, Bob, Sally, whatever you want to call your microbiome, there not only is there diversity, but they will also act differently in different circumstances. And so, thinking of the microbiome is sort of wrapping this human shell around them, but anthropomorphizing them so that you understand that they have a personality, that they can get stressed out, that their calm can affect your calm. So, the microbiome obviously is in some sort of communication with us, but get us to as close as a layman's understanding of exactly how that communication works. So, like for instance, if Lisa doesn't meditate in the morning or doesn't sometimes even meditate right before she eats, just eating will upset her stomach. Even though it's safe food. But meditating makes a difference. So So again, remember that our body is not a one-way tunnel. It is a bidirectional thing, right? So the stress that we have causes our microbiome to change. And when your microbiome is upset, it causes us to be stressed or anxious or depressed, right? So how? What's the mechanism? So the mechanism is you know, the depression or anxiety is the inflammation, right? So when you your microbiome is releasing things like lipopolysaccharides, they are absorbed in the blood that causes the immune system to have a low-grade inflammation. And the low-grade inflammation is what causes you to be depressed, right? But why does it or how does it How does inflammation have so many varied responses? Yeah. So think about inflammation is like a you know, a a con- constant body in alert situation. So your immune system is constantly alert. And one way for it to kill what they think is the enemy is to create the inflammation so it can engulf it and essentially destroy it, right? But you have that thing was really really good when you actually had some communicable disease or when you were trying to do fight or flight for stress, right? It was really good for body to get ready to fight or flight, right? But when you are in living in a modern society, when you are now stress stress is being caused by relationships. It's caused by because your work environment is not right or you know, monetary thing or or any number of other reasons, what happens to your body is constantly on that alert. And it's constantly releasing the cortisol. And your microbiome is saying, first thing when By the way, when you go into fight or flight response, is your digestive system shuts down. Right. So part of the human uh body for it to survive was to say, "Hey, you're about to get attacked by a tiger. The last thing you need to worry about is try to eat the thing try to digest the thing you just ate. Let's shut down everything that's not necessary right now right this moment." And only have the essential function be working. So, digestive system is shut down. So, when you are stressed, essentially at that point your digestive system is shut down. So, that by meditating, what you're doing is taking the cortisol levels to essentially down. And that allows the body and the microbiome to be essentially saying, "Okay, you're no longer in that fight or flight response. Let's start the digestive system again." But, what I really want to understand, so there's two things. One, I want to know the mechanism by which they communicate, which you talked about optics, which I was like, "What the hell?" So, understanding how they're using photons to actually um communicate. And then part two is why sometimes depression, why sometimes anxiety, why sometimes cancer, like how can inflammation manifest in so many different ways? So, So, first of all, let's start the last part first. If you look at the chronic inflammation, it's not localized, right? So, your whole body is under inflammation. And when your body's under stress, since it's all connected, it always breaks at the weakest link. Okay. Right? So, if your whole body that is like think of it like a chain. And it's at this point when there is under stress, the weakest part of the chain will break first. So, let's assume you've been drinking a lot and you have inflammation. Boom, your liver body is the first one to go. Right? So, if depending on wherever the weakest thing is for other reasons in your life that whatever the weakest subcomponent is, that is the first one to break. Right? And that's the reason you find them in a different the same type of inflammation may cause obesity in one, diabetes in someone else. It may cause a depression in one person, it may cause a autoimmune in someone else, right? Because at the end of the day, depending on wherever this thing pops up, right? And you can And what our pharmaceutical drugs are basically pop pop them all, right? You kill You essentially put this one down, suppress this symptom, it pops up here, and then you get a new set of symptom. And you suppress that symptom, you pop three more symptoms now. And then now, by the time you get to be 60 years old, you're taking more pills for your breakfast than you're eating the breakfast, right? Yeah. And that's literally the business model of our pharmaceutical companies. They really have become, to a large extent, a parasite on society, thriving on these chronic diseases. An interesting thing is chronic diseases are preventable. Unlike the communicable diseases, you catch infection. You don't catch obesity. You don't catch a diabetes. You don't catch depression. It is You develop it over a long period of time. Right? You do share when you start to live together, you start to share your microbiome. And it's very interesting is there's so many studies done that the microbiome actually, not only within the species, even crosses species, causes the symptoms to pop up. So, for example, uh think of your microbiome a- as as a fecal fecal matter. What they did is they took a uh microbiome, put that from a fat man to a mice, and the mice became fat. From a human? From human to different species altogether. And they took the microbiome of a thin person, gave it to the mice, and mice became thin. So, it tells you that not only the microbiome is causative, it is causative across species. All right, really fast, I got to stop you there. So, obviously I've heard that through fecal transplants, you can take some I I knew you could do from mouse to mouse, I didn't know you could cross, but what I want to really bring home for people is the mechanism that is at play there. So, has it to do with metabolites? Has it to do with like what what's the signaling that's a- cuz somebody that's obese right now thinks it's a moral failing. No, it's not. And so, I would Why not? So, obesity is an inflammatory disease. It is not your fault. In fact, you could eat less than anyone else. When people talk about and say, "Oh, he can eat anything he wants and I eat just a tiny bit food I get fat." Because when you have a leaky gut, a leaky gut what I mean by that is your epithelial cell that's supposed to keep the microbiome and the food inside the colon is now is leaking and going into the blood. The blood when these things are food is leaking into the blood, what happened? It freaks out. And when it freaks out, what does it do? Inflammation, right? So, this inflammation happens because you have a leaky gut. And you get allergies, you get eczema, you get all the different types of things because you you have a leaky gut. So, in a fecal transplant, all you're taking is a one ecosystem from one person and you trans you're transferring that microbiome ecosystem into someone else. So, for example, if someone has taken antibiotics and been taking doses of antibiotics have completely killed their microbiome. Or people who have a C. diff infection. So, is a is a C. diff infection is a massive gut infection and the only way to cure is to take a massive doses of antibiotics. When you do that, you're literally throwing a nuclear bomb inside your gut and killing all these microbiome. And and then you repopulate or repopulate them through I wasn't sure if it was your accent for a second. I was like Naveen. You repopulate them through the fecal matter transplant. It's very interesting is one of the person actually got a fecal matter transplant after C. diff infection and suddenly his personality changed. He became obese and depressed. And it turns out the the microbiome it came from a person who was fat and depressed. Right? So, literally the symptoms got transferred from microbiome. Even I I somebody watching right now saying this is black magic, it's witch doctor stuff. Even I part of it I'm like, "Oh god, can it really be that straightforward?" an interesting one. Pick any disease and Google it for yourself and read the research paper. So just type in a Parkinson's and microbiome. Type in depression and microbiome. Type in autoimmune disease and microbiome. Type in cancer and microbiome. Type in diabetes and microbiome. And you'll start to see the impact all the researches these are done. Here's another interesting one. They had a diabetic person who's been taking metformin drug, which is for diabetes. Metformin does not work on the human body. It works on the microbiome. Okay. Right? So it changes your gut microbiome. And here's how we know it. Because they took that microbiome, the person who's been taking metformin, gave it to the mice who is diabetic. Just by transferring the microbiome, it had the same impact as if the mice was taking metformin. Wow. Right. Because it works on your microbiome. As you know, the gut microbiome is the root cause of all other diseases. So when you fix your gut microbiome, you're fixing the cancer and all other diseases are also impacted the same time. Whether it's a depression, focus, ADHD, all those diseases are basically inflammatory diseases. Well, really fast let's talk. So if I'm not mistaken, your dad was just diagnosed recently with um cancer. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, so walk me through that. Like what are you doing? How how do you get aggressive about it? I mean So honestly, that was one of those things that um makes me pause about life. And I was thinking that, you know, here I am talking about all the things that you could do simply by fixing your gut. And as you know, we started this company a year ago. And we have learned so much about how human body works. We are challenging the things that people did not know about human body because for the first time we are able to see the things that are going on inside your body. Um and when he called me about 2 months ago and said he had a pancreatic cancer and all I could do was to say, "Oh my god. What if I had started this company 2 years ago or 3 years ago? I would have been able to fix it." And uh all I can do is really at this point I don't know what to do. Uh other than to see and hope that no one else has to suffer through it, right? He has to go through the chemotherapy right now and he's going through the, you know, chemotherapy. I was just with him 2 weeks ago and seeing him, you know, you know, just not be himself, losing constant weight. His hair is gone and he's just shrinking and uh watching him just feels hard, really feels hard and you wish something you could fix. I mean and so I saw this research on pancreatic cancer. I called his uh oncologist and I say, "Have you seen this research?" And he says, "Oh, that's so new." And I say, "Why can't you use this?" And he says, "It's not allowed." And I'm thinking, "What could I have done? I mean, I can I mean, I'm thinking I I could just tell the doc, 'Hey, this research is good. Do this. What is the harm here?'" But the doctor has ethical duty that he's not going to implement it because it's not allowed it's not FDA approved. Um so anyway, my only hope is that someday and that day will be soon, it will be our generation time that will one day absolutely make these chronic diseases simply a matter of choice. And I'm absolutely convinced at this point and I'm determined that I'll do whatever it takes so that no one ever have to suffer through any chronic diseases. And um And I know it is doable. And I know we're finding every single day what causes these diseases and how we can modulate these diseases simply through diet. And um we're going to look back at these moments 5 years, 10 years from now and we're going to realize that we were the first generation that wiped off the chronic diseases from the face of this earth. And someday people will look at our generation as the one that used the exponential technologies to create abundance of energy, created abundance of food, and solved all of the global grand challenges that have been facing our species, the human species, for generations. And we're going to solve them. Because there will be people like you, I, and others listening to our podcast and going to say, "Enough is enough." You and I can do things. And that is the beauty of the things I find is that it used to be the large companies, the you know, the robber barons and the aristocrats are the only one who had power to do something audacious. And what's really amazing is this is the first time in the human history that individuals and small group of people are capable of doing things that could only be done by superpowers. That could only be done by the large companies. It doesn't require the lot of financial resources. The cost of these things are coming down so fast. Just to do that Think about it. To do the human genome sequencing cost billions of dollars. Now we can do a complete, not just the DNA sequencing of our own body, the DNA sequencing of every organism. Not just the DNA sequencing, the RNA sequencing of everything that's happening inside our gut. The trillions of these organisms. Tell people why it matters, DNA versus RNA. So DNA is like an alphabet. Um it can write anything. So, you and I share 99.99% same DNA. You me and a tree share the 90% same DNA, right? So, DNA is simply it can express itself in any different way. That's really an accurate number, you and the tree? Uh 90% yeah. Wow. The very interesting thing is if you look at the RNA, so DNA converts into RNA after the epigenetic changes have been made. So, RNA tells you exactly what is happening, not what could have happened. So, DNA tells you potentially everything that could happen and RNA tells you exactly what's happening. So, think of your RNA as the Instagram your snapshot of your life. So, if you want to know your Instagram of your life, you do your poop test. That's funny. By the way, it's very interesting. I was just telling you that in the last you know, with the patients tens of thousands of patients have gone through it. Some of the learnings that we have had actually have changed at least for every doctor how a human body functions. For example, everyone believes the hormones estrogen and testosterone are produced by the human body. Guess what? We are finding that microbiome is actually producing the testosterone and estrogen. Imagine that. I mean What percentage? I don't know that, but we are seeing them produce it. We see the transcripts of the microbiome producing these things, right? It's we are seeing them actually becoming the detoxification of our toxins that we are taking because these guys have to survive. For their own survival, the microbiome starts to change and start to metabolize the toxins into non-toxic thing. And that's the reason if you live in say China or you live in India, there may be a lot of toxins there, but people fine because their microbiome has started to adjust to detoxify these things. And you and I go there, we all get sick because our microbiome doesn't know what to do with them, right? So, we started to see so many things about how microbiome is not only communicating among themselves, they are constantly do something called quorum sensing. How many of us are there? How many of us of us there? And when they start to see that the quantity is sufficient enough, they start to behave very differently because they say, "Okay, now we are the boss here and our rule governs. The man who has the gold has the golden rule, right?" So, they constantly are fighting to see are they you know, if you keep eating one type of food, guess what's happening? Only some set of microbiomes are getting fed. They grow into the quantity and they start to form the biofilm and say, "Now, guys, we are the boss." Dude, this is so interesting and it's one of those things that I hope through the show we can really begin to give people the information that they're going to need to start piecing this together because now having been on this journey for almost 3 years with this is going. Well, it's been madness. So, it started with and and for anybody watching at home, Naveen knows certainly the thumbnail sketch of this and and has helped out tremendously with that, but I I'll walk through the the steps. So, she's always had a sensitive stomach. Yeah. And one day and we just never really thought about it. Like if we went out to Vegas and cut loose, she was going to have an upset stomach. And when I say upset stomach, I mean not vomiting So, she would get an upset stomach. We just knew that that was going to be part of it. She'd have cramps for a couple days and and then it would pass and that was it. So, didn't really think about a lot about it and she used to talk about like, "Oh, my intestines feel inflamed." That didn't make sense to me, so I would just kind of blew it off. And then one day, 3 years ago, she was like, "I'm not feeling well." And then later she calls me from somewhere else in the office and she was like, "No, no, no, I'm really not feeling well. I need to go home." And then she text me and said I just projectile vomited everywhere. I was like, "Wow, that's weird. She has the stomach flu. That really sucks." And you know, but then it didn't go away. Yeah. And so, the stomach flu turned into she just couldn't eat anything. And like everything upset her and gave her massive cramps. And she is not a complainer, so when she starts complaining I know something's really wrong. And our life whittled down to four ingredients, literally four ingredients. So, she was eating basically three kinds of meat and salt. And that was it. She couldn't have vegetables, nothing. I mean, it was crazy. We're getting every test you can imagine and nothing was helping. And one doctor would say, "You have an immune deficiency problem and you need immunoglobulin transfusions." And we were literally about to do that. And I was like, "Something's just not right about this." But I didn't know enough about it. So, but I said, "Let's not do that. That seems scary. Let's go try to learn more about this." And at that time at Quest, we had some people in R&D that were dealing in probiotics and we were starting to talk about the microbiome. And so, we started asking them questions. And that wasn't solving the problem. And so, then we tried ketogenics. And that was the first thing that really helped. And so, that because that brought down the inflammation. So, we were like, "Okay, huge win. This is going to be amazing." And then it just stalled out there. And that was when you said, "Oh, you should try Viome." We tried it and it's been absolutely life-changing. But it is still so big and complicated that part of what I'm hoping, and this will probably be an ongoing series, hopefully we'll get you back again, is like people really understanding why I'm so obsessed with the changing of the metaphor and thinking about the microbiome first, understanding how different her microbiome is from even mine. And then what I really want to know is how do you repair it over time? So, so think about it that, you know, that inflammation happens, obviously is the first number one thing is to make sure you don't have a toxic microbiome. That means your microbiome is is producing the healthy stuff that your body needs, not the toxins that is going into your body. So, just really think of yourself and say, is your microbiome healthy? Is your microbiome toxic? Right? So, that's first part. The second thing is I want to put a fine point on that because I This is what made me think of it a second ago, that notion of a quorum. Yeah. So, the fact that any one of them is looking to see if they're the bully, if they get to call the shots. Yep. And what happened with Lisa was bad bacteria became the lead bacteria, and that's that tipping point. so tipping point happens when your ecosystem goes out of balance. So, it's not the individuals thing they're good or bad. So, it's really not about as much of good bacteria, bad bacteria. We all have the good and bad, but what happens is they stay in check. Mhm. Right? And each other they all keep each other in check. It is when you start to eat certain foods and these guys start to grow, and they say, "Aha, now we're going to control everything else." Right? And that's really when you start to have trouble. Other thing is where you epithelial cells, the barrier, the mucus lining gets thinner, you start to get a leaky gut, and then you have a chronic inflammation all the time. So, the way you do that is you need to change the balance of ecosystem of the microorganism, and you need to start repairing the lining of the gut. And you repair the lining by sometimes giving the right set of supplements and enzymes to repair the gut lining. At the same time, you start to give the prebiotic to feed the some of the guys so they can start to grow, and probiotic to add some of the new stuff, right? And then you start to change the diet, so you starving the bad guys and you starting to prop the good guys, right? You feeding the things that need to be fed, and you adjusting to see not just the organisms, you starting to adjust their functions. So, you start to see how much of the butyrate you are producing. And if you're not producing enough butyrate, which is really good thing, then you have to take some of the butyrate supplement until we can start to grow these guys who got who have a potential to promote to produce butyrate. We need to cut down all the organisms and the food that are feeding the guys who produce this toxic environment. So, for example, when you go on a paleo diet or ketogenic diet, when you're eating a lot of protein, that actually does tremendous amount of harm after a certain part. Most of the protein should be digested in the small intestine in the upper side. When you eat too much protein, it cannot digest, it starts to go down your colon where the all these microbes are there and they never seen the protein before. Guess what happens? They start to feed the group of microbiome and they call them protein fermenters. And these protein fermenters are nasty bastards. They start to eat protein and they start to release uh ammonia. They start to release all of these toxic stuff that it starts to hurt your gut lining, right? So, when you are on some of these diets, you're actually harming yourself. Same thing on a ketogenic diet. When you go on a ketogenic diet and you're fasting, the microbes are saying, "Okay, you're not going to feed me. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to eat the gut lining." So, point is that all the things that are good, at certain point of time they become bad then they essentially you continue with them. And that is really the key is to understand that what is the right food at that point of time and your microbiome is changing but it really becomes a new ecosystem every 3 to 4 months, right? So, it's like in a sense you throw a pebble in the water, you get some ripples and then it comes back to normal. But if you constantly keep shaking it, you start to get the massive waves, right? And that's what I mean by that is that, you know, when you change your diet, it starts to just ripple and that's a ripple and then you when you start to go into completely new diet that is recommended by Viome, then you are starting to see the swell and it starts to get the new ecosystem gets created and now you have a new balance. And if you don't if you continue with the same thing, get the balance that we just created becomes imbalance again because now these guys are taking over. So, what at a really high generic level, and I know there is no universal diet, and I totally get that. But, like at a high level, what are directional advice that you have for people of how to eat? Like cycling, eating wide variety. So, I mean, again, this is exactly what caused all the problems we have. Because we want to simplify and tell people treat your body like a black box. And if you just keep feeding things into it, somehow magic will happen. But, the fact is you can't treat like a black box. You have to know what is going on. If they're not producing the right set of nutrients, you have to feed those guys with the nutrients your body needs. So, if you're not getting enough good stuff, the vitamins and the butyrates, short-chain fatty acids, you got to feed them, or you have to take the enzymes to essentially make up for it. So, you can't just say, "Hey, I'm eating healthy because I'm eating spinach, I'm eating kale, I'm eating avocado." Guess what? That may be exactly what's wrong for you, just like me. You know my story, right? I thought I was eating healthy because I was trying to lose weight, I was try I was pre-diabetic, and I always thought eating spinach, avocado, oats, cut down all the gluten, cut down all the carbs, cut down all the starch. And guess what happened? For the first few months, I lost weight, and I was my blood glucose was going down, and I was happy. I continued with that diet. Guess what happened? I got gained all the weight back, and my blood glucose was going back up again. When I did my Viome test, it turns out I need to be eating 50% of my diet as a complex carbohydrate. I had to cut down spinach, avocado, oats, and start eating more wheat, more gluten. Wow. And start eating lot of the other food that I never eaten. Right? So, everything blood sugar's in check. My blood sugar is went down. My doctor thinks that I must be on some drug that I'm not telling her. She says, "Keep doing whatever you're doing cuz it's working." I used to take Nexium, which was killing me. I cut down all the Nexium, and I thought she was going to be so angry at me. She said, "I'm so glad you're taking Nexium because now you don't have the stomach acid problem, and by the way, you were anemic and your blood you know, your iron was low. It's all back to normal now, so just keep doing what you're doing. Keep taking those drugs that I gave you." What she didn't know is I stopped all of them. And I think this very interesting thing is uh a lot of the food sensitivities go away because food sensitivity is when you measure is you're basically measuring the antibodies in the blood. The reason you get antibodies in the blood is because the blood is seeing the stuff in the blood. Your immune system leaky gut. So, if you have a leaky gut, your immune system is going to see these food in the thing. It creates the antibodies, and you think you're allergic to it. Yeah, yeah. That sounds super familiar. I'm looking at my wife right now, who at one point because she they didn't know she had leaky gut. They were like, "Essentially, you're allergic to everything." And she's not. Right. Once you fix the leaky gut, suddenly 6 months later these antibodies die away, and then suddenly you're no longer allergic to them. Yeah, it's literally what happened to her. Yeah. And you know, to me that is the key is to understand that, you know, why are people talking nowadays is because everyone wants to know about their microbiome, Other thing is really understanding the snapshot of what is it your microbiome doing. Are they actually working for you or they're working against you? So, knowing your superfoods and you knowing your kryptonites. What food is going to cause these guys to produce toxins and the stuff that is not going to be good for your body. And what food is going to allow these guys to produce the nutrients our body needs. So, I So, what we do is we give you your superfoods, we give you your kryptonites and give you the foods you should be eating more of and the foods you should be minimizing and the foods you should be avoiding. And I just said, it's really different for different people. For me and my wife, it's completely opposite. I should be avoiding spinach and oats and avocado. She needs to be eating her superfood is avocado. It's very interesting is that she and I are completely different food. And you know And in fact, now the new test we just added that are essentially giving even more information. So, now we are adding things like urine metabolites. So, we are able to see the organic acids and the amino acids being produced. We are adding things like a blood transcriptomics. And the idea is to be able to see the gene expression of everything that's happening inside the human body. So, you look at the host side which is us and our guest side. So, stool transcriptomics which we call a stool micro the microbiome is stool transcriptomics allows us to see how our guest are doing even though they are the masters, right? And then the host side is our side. So, we look at the mitochondrial gene expression. And then we look at all of the white blood cell gene expression. That means we can see every single inflammation marker. So, we can see cytokines, the interleukins, we can see CRP, all the inflammation that your body is having. And all these things combined including by the way this food sensitivity test allows us to see do you have a leaky gut? Because if you're sensitive to whole bunch of foods, then you know you have a leaky gut. If you're eating everything that's showing up in your IgG the food sensitivity, then we know for sure you have a leaky gut, right? And as I said get your together because you no idea what people can find out from it because just a tiny bit of your stool we you can find out what places you have visited because we know the toxins that came from there. We can find out things like what food you're eating, how much of you are eating, what drugs you're taking, what supplements you may be taking, what type of symptoms you may be having because all that information is right there because How much you exercise. That's one thing that Hellen asked Lisa. She's like, "Are you really lean?" "Yes." "Do you exercise a lot?" "Yes." And she's like, "Oh yeah, this marker shows that. This marker shows that." I'm like, "Whoa." Yeah. So, TCA level is going to tell us actually how much aerobic exercise you're getting. Wow. Yeah. Very impressive. Dude, I don't know if anybody told you, but you've already won. You're like super rich. Why are you working this hard? Oh my god. So, as you know, as you and I have talked about it in the past episodes that success is not about amount of money you have. Success is about how many lives you've been able to improve. And from that part, I'm just so far. I mean, so far to go. You know, we have barely started. So, to me, I am dedicated to doing the things that matter. And and a lot of people who have watched our previous episodes will know that I know I came from a very, very poor background with no food to eat, with absolutely nothing. And to large extent, Don, I mean, the society and the people in this country has given me so much love and so much uh success. I owe it to them. I mean, this is my obligation to pay back my debt. And the only way I know how to pay back my debt is to pay forward. Is by constantly finding ways that can make the lives better for billions of people on this planet. Today, I'm focused on attacking the health care problem and making chronic disease optional. I love the way you think, dude. All right, before I ask my last question, where can they find you online? So, I mean, you can find me on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Facebook. And I've always given out my email. It's now my first name Naveen n a v e e n dot Jain my last name j a i n at gmail.com. Send it to me please if you have any questions anything just know I'm here to help you and I want to do everything I can to make this society a better place for our children and make our children essentially protect our planet. Awesome man and how can they sign up for Viome if they want? You tell them since you know that you know Indians cannot pronounce the word V. Go to viome.com check it out and spell that dude? v i o m e and I will say in fact I'll I'll address that in a second in my outro cuz I have very very strong feelings but for my last question what's one change that you want to see somebody make to improve their life? Becoming intellectually curious. To me there is nothing will make this world a better place. Nothing will make you better human being than to be intellectually curious. The day you become intellectually curious you have taken the first step towards improving yourself and the day you change yourself is the day you can change the world. My only other advice is fall in love with yourself and I don't mean being self-obsessed is stop needing the approval from someone else. The day you fall in love with yourself you can love the person around you. You can love the world but if you hate yourself you're going to hate the world. So fall in love with yourself and share that love with everyone you meet and stay intellectually curious. I dig it. Awesome Naveen. Thank you so much for being on the show. All right. Guys, I'm telling you right now my life was changed by Viome in no uncertain terms and quite frankly from my friendship with this man here and when I say that my gratitude knows no bounds if he asked me to sacrifice goats I would sacrifice goats. We're at that stage. It has been absolutely incredible what Viome has been able to offer us in terms of information about Lisa's health. It's absolutely incredible. I'm not getting paid for this, by the way. This is truly because it had a massive impact on my life, on Lisa's life, and it took me from actually being scared that something would happen to her to believing that we're really on the road to recovery. And it's been unlike anything I've ever seen in my life. He is so passionate about making sure that the system grows and improves with time, and that the more people that use the system, the more people that it's able to help. And it's absolutely incredible to see how rapidly it's growing and how we've been able to benefit from that. So, if you suffer from digestive issues of any kind, I cannot strongly enough encourage you to go to viome.com to sign up, to give it a shot. I think that it could possibly truly change your entire life. It's that big. It's that important. All right, guys. Hopefully this episode really helped you begin to understand the microbiome. I think it is so important, and I think Naveen has the metaphor that's really going to change how people think about this. And I don't think you can overstate how important that is. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, huh? And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Naveen, thank you again, man. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.