Momo (00:00)
If you're stressed chronically, you're destroying your body every single day. Don't take that lightly. And don't think it'll be over sometime. If it's not over for months.

Why is it gonna be over in a few more months, right? And you're damaging yourself every day.

sit down and think what is causing you stress in your life and aggressively find a strategy you it took me several years to leave my home country because of the civil war and because of all kinds of reasons, but I worked on it every single day because I knew it's an investment in my life. And so some of these things don't come easy. People are like, well, I can't just pick up and move. Yes, you absolutely can pick up and move.

Claudia von Boeselager (00:38)
Welcome, Momo to the Longevity and Life's Help podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Momo (00:40)
Super excited to be here.

Claudia von Boeselager (00:42)
Thank you. So starting off, can you just share a bit of your background with my audience and what brought you to where you are today before we dig in?

Momo (00:49)
Yeah, just a really brief version.

I came to the United States when I was 20 years old. And over the last 30 years, I've been basically a scientist my whole life and ⁓ about a decade spent in academia getting trained and doing postdocs and becoming a young scientist. And then I spent 10 years in the US government as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That's from the movie, the Oppenheimer movie. And then

I spent the last 10 years at my company called Viome Life Sciences, where we have taken all of the science that my teams developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and really commercialized them and translated them and put them in people's hands and people can actually benefit from them and not just from our publications. So that's sort of my scientific journey.

Claudia von Boeselager (01:33)
Beautiful. So for decades, we've thought about health, mostly through the lens of human cells and human genes, but your work suggests we're actually more like an ecosystem than individuals. So how does understanding the microbiome fundamentally change what it means to be human? What would you say, Momo?

Momo (01:48)
Yeah, that's a huge topic. Let's

nail down some takeaways and then we'll dive deeper into them to explain them. we have basically co-evolved with the microbiome. And even though we haven't seen it for hundreds of thousands of years, we didn't know about it. And until really early 2000s, we didn't know that it contributed to our physiology. it's a very recent discovery that we have these microorganisms on us that are not parasites. They're not there because they want to be there, but we don't want them to be there.

We've really co-evolved with them and we require them for our health. That's really a main takeaway and that these guys are your best friends and they become your best friends before even birth because during pregnancy they play a very important role in the mother's gut microbiome and vaginal microbiome and so on. We now know that changes in the vaginal microbiome can lead to preterm birth which is one of the most devastating and expensive

pathologies basically in life. And so your relationship with gut microbiome becomes, very important before birth, but this is obviously your mom's microbiome. And then literally after birth, the single most important event in your entire life, even if you live a hundred years, even if you do anything you want in those hundred years, the single most important event is the microbiome you acquire at birth and soon after birth.

And if you acquire the right microbiome and nurture it with the right foods, you have a much higher chance of being cognitively, mentally, physically, and immunologically healthy than if you do not acquire the right microbiome. And you can have a sickly childhood and you can have a sickly life if you do not acquire the right microbiome. And so we can dive deeper into those topics if you think those are of interest, but then nurturing that microbiome.

every single day of your life, every single meal that you have, you should be thinking about, okay, what do I need to feed myself? And then what do I need to feed the microbiome? So fiber is finally coming sort of into the hot zone. hasn't been, know, protein has been sort of the super hot fad recently, but now I think fibers are coming into focus and fibers are specifically going to feed your microbes.

Claudia von Boeselager (03:49)
you

Momo (03:58)
and you have to think about feeding your microbes. And going back to that, acquiring the first microbiome at birth and how important it is, this is a fascinating thing. Humans encode genes that produce molecules, energetic molecules in milk. These are called human milk oligosaccharides. So breastfeeding mothers produce human milk oligosaccharides in milk. It's a significant portion of the calories.

These calories cannot be accessed by the baby. They're specifically for feeding microbiome, the baby's microbiome, to stimulate specific species to colonize and grow and protect the child immunologically, physically, cognitively, and mentally. That is an incredible thing that we are expending energy to feed the microbiome from day one, naturally, all natural evolution. And we need to continue doing that after breastfeeding is over.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:39)
Mm-hmm.

What's up?

Momo (04:49)
and continue consuming these fibers.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:52)
So fascinating. And I want to definitely break it down. You've touched on so many interesting topics there, starting with acquiring the right microbiome from birth. Obviously we don't necessarily have a choice as like a person, but let's say for family that are planning to have kids, et cetera, what does that entail and how can that be done? And bearing in mind the toxins in our environments and the people have had to take rounds of antibiotics, et cetera. is it so important? What does that mean? Can you break that down a bit?

Momo (05:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Let's talk about the natural

way that people evolved to have kids, right? So the natural way is that the mom, first of all, will have microbes at the anus, even just being there all the time, because we used to not shower every day. Like I'm talking to, let's say, humans from 10,000 years ago, right? When it was completely natural wild, there were no human interventions in terms of

toilet paper, showers, antibiotics, cleanliness, any of that stuff. It's just wild birth, right? There are some microorganisms already at the anus, but the most important event that happens is that as the head of the baby is coming down the birth canal, it's at the same time pushing stool out of the colon. So the colon, the last part of the colon is aligned with the birth canal. And so the baby is physically pushing poop out of the colon so that

when the baby's head comes out of a vagina, the poop comes out of the anus and they meet. And this is where the baby acquires the gut microbiome from the mother. And we have basically disrupted that because poop is gross and we didn't realize how important poop is, right? We didn't realize that poop is actually a fountain of youth and super important for child development. so if you just look at

Claudia von Boeselager (06:20)
Wow.

Momo (06:31)
a couple of examples that I think are very dramatic. A few generations ago, kids did not have asthma. Kids did not have food allergies, right? Like when I was growing up, it was unheard of that a child has asthma or food And today, if you hear that a child has asthma or food allergies, that's so normalized. Like there are so many kids that have them. It's just normal, but that's not normal. We've normalized it because it's just become so prevalent, but that is not normal.

Claudia von Boeselager (06:47)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Momo (06:58)
And then the next thing I want to say is IBD. This is mysterious autoimmune disease, inflammatory bowel disease that, you know, used to be for people in the fifties and so on, right? And now that it's crept up down, down, down to younger ages. And so I was talking to one of our advisors who was a gastroenterologist all his life. And he said, when he was doing residency 40 years ago, they may or may not have even heard of a pediatric.

like most of the time you didn't even hear of a pediatric case of IBD. Today in the United States, there are hospitals that have pediatric departments for IBD specifically. That's how many children suffer from IBD. That's not normal. It's just not normal. Like we've normalized it because we can't do anything about it, but it's not normal.

Claudia von Boeselager (07:41)
That's so sad. That's really sad.

Well, the good news is that we can do something about it, I would almost say, right? So obviously the environmental factors, diets, and where things used to be versus where they are now, but what are some of the biggest mistakes, if you will, people are making by not focusing, coming up to and while pregnant, but even pre-pregnancy, what are things that they should be focusing on thinking about?

Momo (08:05)
Yeah.

Claudia von Boeselager (08:08)
in order to optimize the gut health of the baby and then obviously continue thereafter. We'll get to other parts of it.

Momo (08:13)
Yeah, I mean, ideally, the mom

would already have a diverse microbiome and mom would test their stool microbiome. And I, you know, I encourage mothers to test their stool microbiome even before conception. So go get the gut microbiome tested from a reputable source. And the microbiome doesn't have these keystone species, and you can find those out now via chat GPT, you know, these are Akkermansia and...

Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and there are several others that are known to be keystone species, including Bifidobacterium longum, which is one of those keystone species that the baby needs to acquire in order to consume human milk oligosaccharides and protect the gut environment for the baby and enable the baby to develop properly. So you can do those tests. And if you do not have those species,

you can now actually purchase those. So bifidobacterium logum strain infantis is available and you can have it as a mother. You can also give it to your baby. It's actually available for infants so that the first diaper that the baby poops out or wait a few days, test the stool of the baby and find out, do they have bifidobacterium logum strain infantis? Did they acquire Akkermansia Did they acquire the faecalibacterium prausnitzii Roseburia intestinalis These are the kind of super important species.

But I would say the single most important one based on the literature is Bifidobacterium longum strain subsp. infantis And people should read that literature starting with an overview from ChatGpT but then they can dive deeper into the science if they'd like. So that's one thing. The second thing is no antibiotics unless absolutely necessary. I mean, this should be a conversation with the provider, with the healthcare provider, but you

Overuse of antibiotics is one of the major drivers of depletion of these microbial species that are so important for our health, both in moms and children, everyone basically. So take antibiotics very seriously. There are now very large studies, and I mean large studies on hundreds of thousands of people in many countries showing that every single antibiotic dose you take in your life increases your risk of chronic diseases and death. Every single one, it's like alcohol. There isn't...

a safe amount of antibiotics. You cannot say, well, I'm just gonna take this one round. Every single round of antibiotics increases your chances of disease risk, chronic disease risk. And so that's because your microbes are your best friends and you're killing them on a large scale with antibiotics. So don't do that unless you really feel that you need to. Next topic is food preservatives. So,

The food industry has figured out that they can use food preservatives, and these are sorbates and benzoates typically, but there are many others that they can put in food and that'll prevent spoilage of food during processing, during canning, during all these other things so that they can make it cheaper, right? And these preservatives are essentially killing microbes. That's what they do. They prevent bacterial growth.

And so if you're consuming these foods, you're introducing basically antibiotics without knowing that you're consuming antibiotics. And speaking of consuming antibiotics without knowing, non-organic meats likely have antibiotics because antibiotics are being used for animals all their lives. And then you ingest that meat and dairy and you can introduce a lot of antibiotics.

Claudia von Boeselager (11:06)
Mm-hmm.

So poultry and also fish, shrimp, et cetera. Some of them are put in pools of antibiotics just to minimize disease.

Momo (11:31)
You wouldn't, yeah, I

would encourage people to read about this, but I would basically, if you don't want to dive deeper into this topic, non-organic meats are very likely to have antibiotics and they're hurting your microbiome. That's basically a very simple statement. So get your organic meats and then minimize the meats as well, right? You don't need to eat a lot of meat. So these are all kinds of things that, you know, we eat the lowest quality, well, not we, but

In general, the population has been exposed to very poor quality meat with lots of antibiotics and they eat lots of it. And all these things have contributed to the depletion of these key microbial species that are required for your health.

Claudia von Boeselager (12:09)
I'd like to touch on the antibiotic piece so one, think is the awareness. I know some people that think, you know, I have a bit of a sore throat. Let me take antibiotics. And I think the implication is they don't understand, you know, how it's like an atomic bomb almost for the whole gut microbiome. Now, obviously there are cases where antibiotics are necessary. So what are some steps people could take to replenish their microbiome?

Momo (12:22)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is

called rewilding the microbiome. And there are several ways to do that. First is go out in nature and be dirty. And when I say be dirty, don't bring alcohol wipes and wipe your hands every single minute. You know, don't sterilize everything. You don't need to shower every day. Just go for a camping trip for two or three days. Get your hands dirty, meaning pick up objects from nature, pick up soil, get your nails dirty.

and then eat with your hands. So basically just be in nature. I mean, this is how humans evolved. We didn't have Purell, we didn't have wipes, we didn't have shower and soap. Like this is how we used to live. And if you look at now, you know, the remaining indigenous tribes in the Amazon and Africa, they don't use soap, they don't shower, they just, they live with nature. They actually acquire microbes when they go swim in the river, right? Our...

showering actually depletes our skin microbiome whereas theirs gets enriched and if they swallow some of that water, boom, they're rewilding their microbiome. So go out in nature and just be dirty. Don't worry about your kids, you know, digging in dirt and getting their hands dirty. Don't wash their hands right away. It's not like, ew, there's dirt in your nails. We got to wash that. That's natural. Next is, I would say organic farming, picking up organic farming.

If you do organic farming on your own, and I'm talking about, you can have a container garden that's literally two meters by one meter. That's it. You don't need to have a massive yard. find a place to have a tiny, we have, you know, three little container gardens that are about two by one meters and get a garden, get some organic soil in there, plant some plants, some vegetables and get dirty. So when you're introducing the soil, when you're...

picking up the weeds, when you're picking up your plants, you're gonna be working with soil and you're gonna get exposure to soil. And many of the microbes that live in our gut are also soil microbes. And then what I've done, know, people may be grossed out by this, but what I've done is what people have done over the course of the evolution, which is if you dig up a root like a carrot, you don't peel it. Like we didn't have peelers 10,000 years ago. We didn't have soap to wash it. We didn't have brushes to like brush it all off. We literally,

picked up a root from the soil, we shook off the major pieces of soil and then we ate it. And we introduced so many soil bacteria that were coating that root vegetable. And we've basically lost all that. We don't do that anymore because ew, soil is gross, right? But we've disrupted that natural recycling of microbes through our bodies.

And then I would encourage people to take as many probiotics as they can. I know this is a touchy subject and people are like, well, you don't need to take it, don't take it. But like, seriously, these, all of these commercial probiotics, they're like known to be useful members of our microbiome. like, what are the risks? Like what, what is bad about taking probiotics? Like, I don't understand that. I take a ton of probiotics in addition to already having a very complete microbiome.

In addition to feeding my microbiome every single meal, I still take probiotics on a regular basis. I don't take them every day, but I take them on a regular basis. And if you're worried about probiotics, you can go absolutely to town and explore your fermented foods, right? I mean, go to your Asian store and get a bunch of vegetables that are fermented. Go to your Greek store and get a bunch of yogurts, Bulgarian yogurt. Go wild on fermented foods.

And you can even make fermented foods at home. Making fermented foods at home is a completely natural process. You're literally going to, you know, wipe your hands on your arms, on your forearms to pick up the microbes from your skin. And then you're going to get into your cabbage and massage that cabbage to transfer those microbes into the cabbage. And then those microbes are going to eat the carbs from the cabbage and make it, you know, sauerkraut. And that's it.

that it's that simple. magic of making sour vegetables or fermented vegetables. That's it. In the old days, people used to do gross things like put sauerkraut in like a barrel and let a kid with dirty feet step in there and mash it. That's the natural way of making sauerkraut for hundreds of years. Now that's too gross, but then, okay, fine. Just wipe your forearms and introduce it into your cabbage and make your fermented vegetables.

Claudia von Boeselager (16:36)
Really?

Momo (16:46)
So those are all important ways, but I have to say that some of these keystone species like Akkermansia muciniphila and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii they're strict anaerobes. And what that means is that if they're exposed to oxygen, they die very quickly. And so those are going to be challenging to get unless you get them at birth. Now, luckily,

There are some sources of live Akkermansia today, and there's even a company that just started offering Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and Roseburia intestinalis like a couple of months ago. I don't know how reputable that company is. I don't know how legit that source is, but now we're starting to get even hard to get probiotics commercially available, which is super exciting.

Claudia von Boeselager (17:29)
I think that might be pendulum that you're referring to. They have also the live Akkermansia I've had Dr. Colleen Cutliffe on the

Momo (17:35)
are several now sources of live Akkermansia and our company is doing inactivated Akkermansia. But there is a company now, the first company I've ever heard of that's offering Roseburia intestinalis and fecalibacterium prusnitzii. And these are a keystone species. And that works out to be true that these are live microorganisms and they can colonize.

Claudia von Boeselager (17:43)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (17:55)
That is a very exciting time we live in for one more reason to live in this exciting time.

Claudia von Boeselager (18:00)
I'm sure my audience are keen to know the name of that company.

Momo (18:03)
I can send you the link

Claudia von Boeselager (18:03)
it for everyone in the show notes.

I want to touch on the microbial function, right? So I think there's a lot of people like understanding, okay, there's a microbiome, but is it all the same? Obviously, you're listing different strains. What is the function and what impact essentially does it have on us as humans and why are different strains so fundamental?

Momo (18:19)
Wow, microbial functions.

very important topic. So let's talk about microbial functions in terms of making beer because people are going to associate with that. So let's talk about one microbial function, which is a microbe is going to make ethanol or alcohol. And that is the brewer's yeast, also known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. So how do you make beer? You give food to a microbe and it makes you beer.

So beer is literally micro poop. I mean, literally, it's not like we don't need to sugar coat it in any other way. It is the poop of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a single microorganism. You feed it barley and it poops out all these chemicals and we love them. That's basically what it is. So I call that micro poop. Okay, so what's happening in the gut microbiome and oral microbiome is that we have micro poop from thousands of microorganisms. You feed them certain foods when you feed yourself.

they're gonna take some of that food and they're going to harvest the energy from that food. So that brewer's yeast is harvesting energy stored in the polysaccharides of barley. And when it converts those molecules and polysaccharides into energy, basically the output of that is another chemical called ethanol and other chemicals that make beer taste like beer. And so...

Think of microbial function as converting micronutrients in your food into byproducts and harvesting energy from it. That's how they live. That's what they live off of. So our microbiome doesn't live off thin air, doesn't live off water. It lives off food that we consume. And if we don't feed it, they're gonna die off. So we have to intentionally feed it. functions, let's be very specific. Microbial function means

that a microbe is making a chemical. So this micro poop like ethanol, there are many scientific names. It's a chemical, true. It's a molecule, that's true. It's a metabolite, means it's a part of the metabolic activity of the microbe, right? And so we can call it these different names, but I think the most scientifically accurate name is to say that that's metabolic output of microbiome.

like gut microbiome or oral microbiome, the metabolic output, meaning all the molecules they're pooping out because they can't use them anymore. Those are the molecules that humans have evolved to depend on. So there's a chemical communication between the functions of the microbiome and our immune system and our brain and our muscles and our liver. Every part of our body is communicating via these chemicals. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. For decades, we thought that our brain

cannot regenerate, meaning that once a neuron dies, that's it. And so that we decline with age. Now we know that that's not true. You can actually improve your cognition as you age because there is a regrowth of human neurons in the central nervous system. One of the chemical signals that tells neurons to regrow is called indole and is produced by several microbes in the gut microbiome.

We cannot consume those molecules. They're made by the gut microbiome specifically, indole. And here's again where we come into, people are worried about certain names and they're like traditional biologists and microbiologists have tried to classify gut microbes as good or bad. And that's such a bad thing to do. And it's done just so much damage to the whole field where E. coli, for example, my God, E. coli is bad. It's gonna kill you. Well, there are...

Claudia von Boeselager (21:28)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (21:36)
tens of thousands of strains of E. coli and there are strains that will kill you and there are strains that are essential for our life. They're your best friends. so saying that someone has E. coli in their gut is essentially meaningless. it doesn't tell you anything. Okay. But if a test like our Viomes test says your E. coli is producing indole, that's a super healthy thing.

Claudia von Boeselager (21:46)
wow.

Momo (21:59)
If our test says you're E. Coli producing too much lipopolysaccharide or LPS, that's a bad thing. So there are thousands of examples where the same bacterium can be beneficial, it can be harmful. And that's based on which parts of its genome it's activated. so functions, an average bacterium encodes for 3,000 functions. And some of those functions,

Claudia von Boeselager (22:05)
you

Momo (22:20)
most of those functions are going to be neutral. They are for the bacterium to survive and thrive in the gut ecosystem, right, or oral ecosystem. But some of those functions may provide essential chemical signals for our physiology, and some of those functions may provide harmful molecules that are going to damage our physiology. And so knowing which bacterium is there is usually pointless because you don't know what it's doing by

Claudia von Boeselager (22:21)
Wow.

Momo (22:47)
by measuring the functions of that bacterium, can say, okay, this bacterium is there, it's doing you harm, you need to stop eating foods that have micronutrients that are feeding those functions that are causing you harm so that the bacterium will be starved for those functions, right? But that same bacterium can produce something very meaningful to you, and so you need to eat these foods because they have micronutrients that are feed the same microbe to produce other beneficial metabolites.

And so that's really the core of what we're doing at Viome is learning first, what are the beneficial metabolites and what are the harmful metabolites? And we rely heavily on the literature for that. There's a lot of literature that shows that. We do have a lot of discoveries that we've made at Viome that are not yet published in terms of what metabolic activities of the gut microbiome and oral microbiome are associated with health and disease. We do have a lot of data because we have now the most microbiome data of any

any entity in the world. And then once you find out in a person, what are the harmful activities and what are the healthy activities, you want to map those to micronutrients and ask the question, which micronutrients are feeding the healthy microbiome activities? That person should be consuming foods that have those micronutrients. And then you identify micronutrients that feed that person's microbiome to produce harmful metabolites.

Claudia von Boeselager (23:52)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (24:09)
And then the computer maps those micronutrients to foods and says, you should be minimizing or avoiding these foods because they're gonna tell, they're gonna give your microbiome the fuel to make harmful chemicals. And that's basically how we're tuning oral and gut microbiome to become more beneficial for the host.

Claudia von Boeselager (24:25)
This is absolutely fascinating and congratulations on this research and this work. My mind is a bit blown at the moment that how precise it can be. I'd love to double click on that because I could imagine that by eliminating certain foods, would it not be beneficial for other microbes that those are beneficial for the other ones? to define which ones are prioritized to omit because it's detrimental.

Momo (24:46)
Yeah. Yeah. So...

Yeah.

Claudia von Boeselager (24:50)
versus

minimizing or maximizing for other ones that would be beneficial, if that makes sense.

Momo (24:51)
Yeah, absolutely. So now we're getting into really,

really deep AI and molecular data, but let's double click on it, like you said. So we're finding out that it's not possible to cleanly say, you should be eating only these micronutrients and you should be avoiding all of these because there's a clear line. You're absolutely right. There are overlapping micronutrients where

the same micronutrient can cause one bacteria to produce a very beneficial molecule and another one to be fed so that it can produce some harmful molecules. The key here is quantification. Our test quantifies more than 10,000 of these functions in the gut microbiome. And when we quantify them, we know what their level of expression is, meaning how fast those functions are running.

So that's one part of quantification. The second is when we build machine-learned models of any disease, any condition, any symptom, every single microbial function is weighted. That means that we understand how heavily that microbial function contributes to that set of symptoms or diseases. So now we know the importance. The weight computationally is the importance, basically. So now when we test someone's gut microbiome and say,

here are the harmful functions, here are the beneficial functions. Every single one of those, we know how much of that function is actually performed in the gut microbiome, and we know how important it is for the health of that person. And now we ask the computers to compute the best overall diet for that person, such that we maximize the benefit from food and minimize the harm from food. So it's not black and white, you're only gonna eat foods that are gonna be beneficial for you.

and you're gonna avoid all foods that are harmful to you. It's not how it works, right? It's to maximize the benefit, minimize the detriment. And I want people to understand that if you eat three days of bad food, it's not like you're gonna die and develop diabetes and Alzheimer's, right? It takes years and most likely decades. For most diseases, it takes decades for your body to develop symptoms and develop some kind of a chronic disease, right? So it's not overnight. So if you...

systematically every single day, you make good decisions, meaning you are mostly eating healthy foods and mostly avoiding or minimizing harmful foods, over decades, you're gonna be way ahead of the game, right? That's really the key is that people need to take health as it takes decades to become diseased. You cannot reverse that in a day. also health is not something you gain in a day.

Basically from birth, as we discussed, from the first diaper, from the first meal, you have to take care of your health. It's a fine tuned complex machine that we're running here, like one of the most complex objects in the universe. And it takes a lot of care every single day. the best practice is to simply integrate what I call the four pillars of health into your life, integrate it so that it's not a burden.

Like people think, I have to cook. And it's like, what am I gonna eat today? Where am I gonna get it? What is the recipe? If you have to think those negative thoughts about Its gonna be a struggle every day to eat healthy. If you learn how to cook and you don't need recipes to cook, my whole family, even including my 20 year old son, we can cook any cuisine from any world with no recipes. We can cook Ethiopian food and

Claudia von Boeselager (28:04)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (28:16)
on Ethiopian food and make new recipes with Ethiopian food, all three of us. And we go to the local Ethiopian store and get the raw ingredients. And that's not foreign to us that like, we love it. We do it all the time. And we've integrated food and cooking into our lives. And then it becomes an excitement and a positive relationship. The same with exercise, the same with sleep and the same with Zen. You develop a positive relationship and then it just flows. And that's really, I think,

the biggest takeaway from this whole conversation you understand the importance of all these things and how you're investing in yourself so that when you're in your 60s, you can wake up healthy and excited and go enjoy every day. That is what longevity is. Longevity is not to live to 90, but be on oxygen and multi-drugs and live horrible living condition. That's not longevity. Longevity is

you're 65, you're retired, you're financially now stable, you can go anywhere in the world, you can hike any hike, you can be anywhere you want, and you're gonna be energetic and excited and excited and thrilled about life. That's what we're trying to build. In order to build that, you have to start from your first meal and your first diaper every single day. And to do that sustainably, you have to have that positive relationship with these pillars of health. If you do not have it,

Claudia von Boeselager (29:09)
Yep.

Momo (29:37)
If you struggle to go to the gym or struggle to go biking or walking and you have to convince yourself every single day to do it because you didn't sleep well the night before, it's not gonna work. It's only gonna work for so long.

Claudia von Boeselager (29:48)
Yeah, it's going to be a struggle. Momo, will you share more about your optimal routines? I'm sure people are curious listening, including foods that you know are phenomenal and that you and your family enjoy. in your day and your week?

Momo (29:58)
So when it comes to food, there isn't optimal

diet. isn't any food that's good for everyone and there isn't any optimal diet for anyone. It has to be personalized. When my wife eats potatoes, I eat sweet potatoes because they have different effects on us. And we have several other foods like, I have to minimize tofu, so I switched to lentils and chickpeas and beans. I cannot have black beans. My wife can have black beans. so,

When we cook beans, we'll make black beans and pinto beans. And I can have some black beans, but I need to minimize them. But I can have as many pinto beans as I want to. So these are the kinds of things that you would never know unless you do a test, which is why we developed our technology. I have worked on this problem for 16 years. So diet has to be personalized. And on that topic, I encourage people to do our full body intelligence for Viome, which is going to profile stool saliva and blood.

And then I encourage people to do a food sensitivity and food allergy test. If your immune system is reactive to a food, it doesn't matter that it has the best ingredients for you. You should not be consuming it. You should then integrate, you should tell Viome that you are sensitive or allergic to a food. And our computational algorithms will automatically adjust and find the beneficial micronutrients from that food in other foods automatically. That's the beauty of the system, right? It automatically adjusts. And then if people,

have the money or have health issues, I would recommend that they do their yearly checkup with lipid panel blood tests, metabolic blood tests, hormones, vitamins, ions, metal ions, all of those. In the United States, as far as I know, every insurance company covers one of those comprehensive tests once a year. Why wouldn't you do that if it's free? You just go for a blood draw and get it done.

So I encourage people to do that even in their 40s and even younger if they want to. And then I encourage people to test every once in a while for heavy metals and for mycotoxins. I think that heavy metals and mycotoxins are these hidden exposures that people simply don't know about that can cause in younger age milder symptoms like my joints are a little bit creaky. I have brain fog.

Claudia von Boeselager (31:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Momo (32:07)
I'm just not 100 % mentally, cognitively sharp. I get sick often, like something's going on, right? I would encourage people to consider those tests. So those are like, without those tests, you don't know. And you can be guessing and you can be trying different things and you may actually harm yourself. Like there's so many ways to harm yourself if you try different things. Like people are jumping onto carnivore diet without really knowing the long-term consequences of that. So that's on the food.

Claudia von Boeselager (32:21)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (32:34)
And of course I can talk for hours about food, but that's food. The next is exercise. And we can talk for a full hour about exercise easily, but we don't have that kind of time. So let's summarize it. You should be aiming for a one and a half hours of cardio exercise per week and one and a half hours of resistance training per week. That's what you should be aiming for. And try to figure out a way to make that happen. Now, those are optimal times for most people.

optimal. They're not like try something, they're optimal. So if you could not do resistance training for an hour and a half, 20 minutes of resistance training is infinitely better than zero. So don't say, I don't have time to go to the gym. You buy two dumbbells, just literally two dumbbells, like 10 pounds or 15 pounds. And with those two dumbbells or resistance bands, you can actually exercise anywhere you are. I take resistance bands with me in my suitcase when I travel.

Claudia von Boeselager (33:15)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (33:30)
and you can do it in a hotel room, right? You can do pushups free, no equipment. Do pushups, you can do squats, air squats free, no equipment. You take your dumbbells, you can do your little Romanian deadlifts or deadlifts, whatever you prefer. You can do your lateral raises, you can do your bicep curls, you can do your triceps. You can get a full body exercise with two dumbbells. So there's no excuses anymore, right? We know that. So.

Claudia von Boeselager (33:32)
Yeah, me too.

Momo (33:56)
If you're in your 20s and you're strong, fine, don't worry about it. But if you're starting to get closer to your 50s and definitely past your 50s, you got to pick up resistance training. And then cardio, super beneficial. If you cannot do an hour and a half of like vigorous exercise per week, go walking for an hour and a half for a week. That's nothing. 90 minutes in seven days is nothing. Like take a lunch break and go walking, right? That's easy.

Claudia von Boeselager (34:20)
Yep.

Momo (34:21)
Two next topics, could cover, know, Zen we can cover in many hours, but let's cover it quickly. Zen means it's a state where you do not fear people or events or doing things. You have to have that calmness and enjoyment and excitement about doing things. And if you have a stressful, know, cortisol is a stress hormone and cortisol literally shrinks your brain. And so,

Claudia von Boeselager (34:41)
Mm-hmm.

Momo (34:46)
Stress is not to be taken lightly. If you're stressed in your life, you're unlikely to go exercise, you're unlikely to go cook good food, you're unlikely to sleep well, and you're basically destroying all four pillars of your health. And so if you have a stressful situation at work, aggressively address it. If you have a stressful situation at home, aggressively address it. Aggressively to the point where I left my home country,

because I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to deal with stress of living there. And so, if you have to do dramatic things like move to another house, move to another city, change jobs, do it. It's one of the biggest investments you can make in your life. If you're stressed chronically, you're destroying your body every single day. Don't take that lightly. And don't think it'll be over sometime. If it's not over for months.

Claudia von Boeselager (35:16)
.

Momo (35:33)
Why is it gonna be over in a few more months, right? And you're damaging yourself every day. find ways.

Claudia von Boeselager (35:39)
That's really good wisdom, Momo. Well done. And some people means getting divorced as well, by the way. So, yeah.

Momo (35:41)
Some people means again, mean, yes, mean,

sit down and think what is causing you stress in your life and aggressively find a strategy that, you it took me several years to leave my home country because of the civil war and because of all kinds of reasons, but I worked on it every single day because I knew it's an investment in my life. And so some of these things don't come easy. People are like, well, I can't just pick up and move. Yes, you absolutely can pick up and move.

If you live in an environment where you cannot create Zen, you must change it. You must. So if you love the environment except for like one asshole at work, right? Or something like that, go and aggressively pursue finding ways to move the department, reporting that person's behavior. You know, we have so many narcissists and that's another huge topic. there are narcissists are everywhere and they're gonna make your life miserable.

and they're never gonna stop. They're like a terminator. They will never stop making your life miserable. They will find new ways to make your life miserable at work. And so if you work with those people, you have to find a way to get out of that, either by them leaving you or by you leaving. There is no other option. They're not gonna let you be. And so these are the fundamental things for Zen. And then there's more fine-tuned things like finding enjoyment in things.

you know, going from me having to come up with a recipe, going grocery shopping, and then cooking it and then burning it or not coming out well. And it's like, wow, this whole experience was hard and stressful. And it sucks. I'd rather just go out and get a meal, right? To now, I'm excited to cook every single meal. Like that's like, I wake up thinking what or the night before, I'm like thinking, what am I going to cook the next day? Because I'm so excited about it.

It's a transition. doesn't take overnight to do that. But once you establish it, it is an amazing thing. going to the gym in grad school was like painful. Now going to the gym is like, I cannot wait to go to the gym. So there's just fine ways to figure all this out. So that was Zen. Again, we should maybe have a whole hour of that. Last but not least,

Claudia von Boeselager (37:48)
go ahead.

Momo (37:48)
is If

you're sleep deprived, everything else in your life is going to suffer, everything. And I mean, that's not an overstatement. Everything is going to suffer. You're basically, you're killing your immune system so you may get sick more often. You're not going to be productive at work. You're gonna get into stressful situations that you cannot properly respond. You're gonna be tired, so you're not gonna wanna go cook, so you're gonna order a meal and eat a...

crappy meal that's gonna destroy your health, right? You're not gonna go hit the gym because you're tired. You're not gonna go for a walk. You're gonna wanna sit in your office and eat your snack. So the night before is when you set up your entire day for success. And if that night before is not successful, meaning you didn't get enough sleep, your entire day is destroyed. And so the way to have a successful day is to think about it the night before and say,

I'm going to create an environment where I can sleep and I'm gonna turn off all my devices and I'm gonna go to sleep on time because I understand that I must get seven and a half or eight hours of sleep however many you need. I need eight hours of sleep and if I get eight hours of sleep, my day is gonna be joyful. It's going to be focused. It's going to be productive. I'm gonna feel good about myself. I'm gonna enjoy everything that I do. I'm gonna be eager to do things and in the moment, I'm gonna enjoy my day. If I get six hours of sleep,

That's not gonna happen. I'm gonna struggle. I'm gonna be sleepy in the afternoon. I'm not gonna go to the gym, all these things. I mean, just hyper important every single night, go to sleep on time and wake up on time. Sleeping from 10 to six or 11 to seven, eight hours, how reasonable is that? That's super reasonable. But going to bed at two o'clock in the morning and waking up at seven, that's not reasonable.

you're chronically setting yourself up for bad health in the future.

Claudia von Boeselager (39:33)
One more question. What is your take on naps and how can naps potentially support if you don't get a good night or is it something that should be integrated into the day and does it have an impact on the microbiome?

Momo (39:41)
Yeah, I mean, all of the

scientific literature points to naps being beneficial. If you get eight hours of sleep, you do not need naps. Naps are there to make up some of the lost sleep. So I don't encourage naps. I don't think people should plan for naps. I think that you should plan for getting eight hours of sleep. And if you do that, I don't get sleepy at all.

like at all during the day. I'm hyper excited all day because I'm rested. Now, every once in a while you can have a rough night for many reasons, you are traveling or you're excited about something, you couldn't go to sleep on time or you woke up early, who knows, right? Then I think naps are absolutely perfect, way to overcome that deficiency. Absolutely perfectly fine.

Claudia von Boeselager (40:22)
Well, I have a question for you regarding a gut microbiome and neurodivergence. I know this is a sensitive topic for some, what is your research or what is research in general that you have seen show around this? conclusions you can draw?

Momo (40:33)
Yeah. So we have not focused on that

at Viome, but there's a huge amount of literature and the gut microbiome likely plays a major role and it starts to play that role during pregnancy. things like gut microbiome both produces serotonin and stimulates serotonin production in the gut of the mother and the fact that placenta is permeable to serotonin and serotonin stimulates brain growth.

in the fetus. That's one of many, many, many things that gut microbiome contributes to. But there are many other neurotransmitters and other nervous signals that are very important in early childhood development and early life and throughout life. And so now there are many papers basically showing a very strong association of gut microbiome with all kinds of cognitive and mental health.

issues. And the causative proof in humans is lacking in many cases. But what's really fascinating and convinced me that this is actually important way back in the early days is that you can take, let's say, poop from a person with autism and person who is healthy and give it to the same genetic mice that don't have any microbiome already in there.

and those mice acquire the phenotype or the disease of the person that donated the poop. And this has been now reproduced for probably 30 or 40 human diseases where you can transfer the disease from a human to a mouse, which is fascinating and really points to causation and not association. And so, yeah, I think that, for example, this, what the...

Claudia von Boeselager (42:03)
⁓ yeah.

Momo (42:10)
PERS calls the autism epidemic, you know, is to a large degree caused by overuse of antibiotics during pregnancy, overuse of antibiotics during child development and early child development, and eating horrible food that does not feed the microbiome. So even if the mother has a healthy microbiome in terms of composition, if you do not feed it the right food, has anyone ever made beer from lettuce?

Will brewers make you beer from lettuce? It will not. Will it make it from pork? It will not. Will it make it from other foods? No, you have to feed it barley in order to get beer. And so if you don't, even if you have the right microbes, if you don't feed them the right food, they're not gonna serve you well. And that's really, again, the key concept from this conversation is,

Your microbes are your best friends at every single part of your life, Feed them every single day, take care of them. They're about half of your physiology. Half of your health is determined by the gut microbiome. Take care of them.

Claudia von Boeselager (43:07)
So, so important. And I'd like to touch on chronic disease in the future of medicine, Momo, and you've made a bold statement that we could eliminate most chronic diseases and cancers within the next decade. What gives you that confidence?

Momo (43:16)
Yeah.

All right, so

here are two examples from real life that give me that confidence that I would like people to take away. The bubonic plague or the Black Death of the medieval times wiped out a third of the world's population, killed a third of the world's population, right? And at that time, people had no idea what was the root cause. You literally fell ill and it was bad luck if you died, it was good luck if you survived. Today,

someone gets cancer, it's bad luck. Like we're in the dark ages for cancers and chronic disease. If you get diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, that's bad luck today in the 21st century, okay? But it's not bad luck, it's biochemistry we do not understand. And I'll touch upon that in a minute. The second example I want to give is, if you brought a twin turbine helicopter, modern helicopter to a

primitive tribe in the Amazon, you flew it there and it breaks down and you tell the villagers, I have this complex machine, fix it. Would they be able to do it? They wouldn't even know where to start. They don't know what parts are there and what they do and how to measure them and how to fix them. They know nothing about it. That's what our body is today to us. It's a complex machine we don't understand. But if you bring a mechanic with the right tools,

Claudia von Boeselager (44:20)
Most likely not.

Momo (44:31)
they're gonna go and measure all kinds of things, troubleshoot, find the part that's broken, replace it, and boom, the helicopter flies because that mechanic knows exactly how this thing works and what parts cause what things. And that's exactly what preventive maintenance and like when you go fly an airplane, what you don't understand is that we implemented preventive maintenance for airplanes decades ago, where instead of waiting for an airplane to break down in flight and then everyone dies,

We actually ensure that the plane is perfectly healthy before it takes off. And that's why airline travel is so safe. We are applying it via on the same principles to the human body. Understanding the biochemistry of what causes diseases and then understanding how we can modulate that biochemistry. And so here's a very simple thing that everyone can do that we already know today. You don't need any fancy tests or anything like that. Let's talk about that.

All right, so we know that if you vaccinate 100 people, not everyone is going to be protected from the disease. Vaccines have efficacy between, let's say, 50 and 90%. And people didn't know why that was, right? Why is it? Second phenomenon that people observe is that there are people who get sick very often.

And you observe, hey, why am I getting COVID again or flu again? I got it last year. Why is my immune system not remembering it, right? Okay, so there's something called immune memory. And that immune memory is due to B cells and T cells. These are types of immune cells that remember. They basically, they remember a pathogen and they survive in blood and they live in the blood, in your blood for tens of years. And if you encounter that pathogen again, they're right there and they protect you and you don't get sick.

So let's talk about memory T cells and COVID, for example. So COVID is caused by a virus and T cells take care of viruses for the most part. And so if you either get a COVID vaccination or you get a COVID infection, all of these T cells jump on it and you eventually get better unless you die, but you'll get better. And these T cells that responded to that infection will all die off unless

Claudia von Boeselager (46:13)
Amazing.

Momo (46:34)
they get a chemical signal from your gut microbiome called butyrate. So now this is not ethanol like we talked about with Brewer's yeast, it's butyrate. It's another micro poop from microbiome. If butyrate is produced by the gut microbiome a few days after an infection or vaccination, it will signal those T cells not to die, but to convert themselves to memory T cells.

and create a lasting memory for that infection so that you don't get sick again. And how do you get butyrate out of your microbiome? You have to feed specific microbes, specific fibers. So there are hundreds of different fibers and there are hundreds of different microbes that can make butyrate. You have to match them up, give them fiber, they will convert fiber to butyrate. So just like we talked about, Brewer's yeast making ethanol out of barley. These guys are gonna make butyrate out of

specific fibers that butyrate will go into the bloodstream, circulate and signal your T cells to convert to memory T cells. And now you're not gonna get COVID next year or flu next year. So this is a very natural mechanism that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years that we've broken by eating white wheat and not eating whole wheat, for example, right? Or not eating root vegetables, not eating onions, not eating all these

fibrous plants that we used to depend on. Now people are just eating meat and potatoes, right? Or fries and burgers. And the burgers have white wheat, the whitest wheat. There is no fiber in it.

Claudia von Boeselager (48:01)
No, zero fiber. As we finish up today, I realize we're getting to time and I have many more questions. So maybe at some point we do around two. This is so fascinating, Momo. Amazing research that you're doing. What are some of the things that you're working on at Viome currently that you're most excited about?

Momo (48:13)
Ooh, okay, so ⁓

every day is exciting. I would say the single most important thing that we're doing today is that we have now clinically validated our tests from human saliva, stool and blood all the way to disease risk. So this is now clinically validated, meaning that when we provide a healthcare provider with the test results,

the test results include disease risk for many chronic diseases and that list will expand But here's the key. You can do a genetic test and it'll say, let's say you have a 10 % higher chance for a disease like IBD.

If you do a genetic test and it has a higher risk for something, there's nothing you can do about it. That's your so if you don't have the disease, you can't do anything about it to prevent it. And if you get it, there's nothing you can do to reverse it because DNA is just, you were born with it, right? But having a disease risk by DNA, it doesn't mean you're gonna develop that disease at all, right? Most people that have a disease risk by DNA test, they don't develop

We have quantum leap that whole process of genetics into this RNA sequencing where when we tell someone you have a high risk of a disease, we tell them exactly which parts of their physiology are broken that are driving that risk. We quantify them. It's a clinically validated test that quantifies that. And killer, killer deal is we tell you how to fix it. See, that's the thing that every output of our test is actionable.

Do this, don't do this. And it's very specific for every person. There isn't generic, go eat healthy. That doesn't mean anything. Like, I don't know what that means. That doesn't mean anything. And so that's really what I'm proud of. And those tests are only available for health care providers in the US currently. And so what we're trying to do is integrate nutrition into every single interaction between a health care provider and a patient.

Claudia von Boeselager (49:51)
Yeah.

Momo (50:06)
every single interaction. We need to integrate nutrition because it's such a pillar of health and it's not in medical schools. The advice is not being given by doctors. And so we're trying to empower doctors, use 16 years of our expertise and $250 million in machine learning and a million samples we've collected and analyzed, use it immediately. Here's the product ready to go to integrate nutrition into your

into your healthcare practice, no matter what the person is coming for, whether they're perfectly healthy, they just wanna stay healthy, or whether they have a disease or anything, it doesn't matter. That's really to me, the pinnacle of where we've come. And we have shown now through three randomized controlled trials that this process works. So we have those results, we need to publish them soon. And then there are, we can spend hours on all kinds of other exciting things.

Claudia von Boeselager (50:56)
I would love to follow up on that as well. So, so exciting. And this is why I find it such an amazing time for living well. for me, longevity is stepping into your highest best self today and living like that for as long as possible. clearly this is a test to help people to do that too. MoMo, where can people follow you, find what you're up to, where would you like to point them to? And we can link it to the, in the show notes.

Momo (51:15)
Yeah, so my co-founder,

Guru Banavar and I have started our own podcast. It's called Two PhDs on a Pod. So I encourage people to watch that because we're discussing everything about human physiology, chronic diseases, microbiome, oral microbiome we didn't touch. And we can talk about that really for a long time because it's super important for human health. And then people can follow me on LinkedIn. I post quite a lot on LinkedIn.

⁓ And then I encourage everyone, like I said, test yourself in order to know where your physiology is and what you need to do and do as many of these tests as you can afford.

Claudia von Boeselager (51:48)
Beautiful. Thank you to your audience for tuning in, Momo. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your wisdom and for the work that you're doing in the world.

Momo (51:52)
Thank you for hosting and spreading the information.

This is super important.

Claudia von Boeselager (51:55)
Beautiful. Thank you so much