Your Health Starts in Your Gut and Onegevity Can Prove It

Trevor Hess
Nov 29, 2020
8 min read

Updated: Dec 21, 2020

With all the health tests out there, it can be overwhelming to know which of them yield the best insights all without breaking the bank. However, I can tell you that one company in particular is above the rest when it comes to providing you with some truly unique data — Onegevity.

Onegevity is a fairly new company, comprised of passionate researchers and health care providers, focused on developing personalized next-gen health intelligence technology. What makes their products so next-gen? Well, Onegevity utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to reveal the meaning behind infinite combinations of biomarker results. In fact, they implement what's known as a multi-omics approach, meaning they collect data from multiple "omes," including the genome, proteome, transcriptome, epigenome, and microbiome.

Currently, their line of tests includes Gutbio, Agebio, and Performbio, with each analyzing one or more of the "omes." However, the most interesting of all the tests, which I had the opportunity of trying out, is Gutbio. What makes Gutbio so special? Unlike traditional tests that look at common biomarkers such as lipid, vitamin, or hormone levels, Gutbio analyzes your microbiome to provide insights into how your gut might be affecting your health.

You might not have known that your health starts in your gut, but it's true. From the time we're born, various bacteria begin to populate our guts, each playing a unique role in our health. In fact, we are host to more bacteria than there are cells in our body. More specifically, there's a ratio of about 1.3:1 microbes to cells in our body, with our body playing host to about 100 trillion microbes at one given time. Yes, you heard that right — I guess we're not as human as we thought.

Nevertheless, Gutbio leverages this fact and attempts to connect the dots as to how these bacteria play a role in our health. How does it do this in the first place? Gutbio utilizes what's know as "advanced whole-genome shotgun sequencing," which enables the test to measure and identify every microorganism found in a small stool sample from the user, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, yeast, fungi, and parasites. Using this data, the test then provides the user with insights and recommendations, including supplemental recommendations from Onegevity's sister company, Thorne, all through an easy-to-read report.

Of all the data provided in the report, there are specific measurements that I believe to be most relevant to your health. So that's what I want to do for the remainder of this article — run through my report and explain the best insights I've gained from Gutbio.

1. Inflammation

Inflammation may be the single most important health marker for you to pay close attention to, and for good reason. Although some inflammation can be a good thing since it's a natural response to injury or infection, for the most part, being excessively inflamed puts you at high risk for developing a whole host of chronic diseases.

So how does Gutbio assess inflammation? It does this by analyzing the balance of inflammation-associated bacteria to bacteria that are less inflammatory in order to assess your probability for developing associated conditions, such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

IBD is a condition in which your gut is constantly inflamed, resulting in symptoms such as abdominal pain, gas, diarrhea, and constipation. There are two main types of IBD: Chron's disease and ulcerative colitis. Regardless of the type, IBD is believed to be an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the tissues of the intestines, resulting in the gastrointestinal tract being constantly inflamed.

Clearly, without using Gutbio, it can be fairly difficult to determine whether your gut is overpopulated with inflammatory bacteria, or if you simply have too little non-inflammatory bacteria. From my results, you can see my inflammation status is nearly perfect, suggesting I have just the right amount of good and bad bacteria as they relate to inflammation. Based off my inflammation score, I can confidently assume that the lifestyle approaches I've been implementing are effective for keeping any excess inflammation at bay.

2. Diversity

Another important biomarker Gutbio assesses is diversity. Gut microbial diversity is exactly what is sounds like — the amount of different bacteria residing in your gut. With that being said, the greater the variety of bacteria you have, the better.

So what are the benefits of a highly diverse gut microbiome? Well, for starters, it can be harder for infectious species to thrive in a diverse microbiome of beneficial bacteria. In addition, a diverse microbiome helps you to adapt to changes in your diet more easily and facilitate the digestion of different nutrients from foods. In fact, you can increase your microbial diversity simply by eating a larger variety of nutrient-rich foods. One point that came as a surprise even to me is that exercise can also increase microbial diversity, especially when you change up your exercise environment, frequency, and intensity.

On the flip side, there are detrimental outcomes to not being microbial diverse. For instance, individuals with low gut microbial diversity are at greater risk for developing adverse conditions ranging from allergies to obesity. Regarding obesity, just because your microbiome is diverse doesn't mean you're in the clear. For instance, when you choose to eat a certain food, you're choosing to feed certain bacteria that thrive on that food. So, if you choose to eat sugar-laden foods, you're choosing to feed the bacteria in your gut that thrive on sugar. As a result, you're likely to develop sugar cravings because those same bacteria in your gut are craving sugar as well. Finally, I believe the single worst thing for your microbial diversity is antibiotics. Antibiotics, which are commonly used to treat infections, are also nonspecific killers of bacterial populations. This means that antibiotics are unable to distinguish between good and bad bacteria in the gut, and as a result, wipe out both. So while you may have eliminated the harmful bacteria by using an antibiotic, you also likely eliminated good bacteria that help prevent you from contracting those harmful bacteria in the first place.

Nevertheless, you can see that my diversity score definitely falls in the acceptable range. In fact, my microbiome is 89.0% more diverse that other Gutbio users. However, it's important to notice that Gutbio rates your gut microbial diversity by comparing your gut to other Gutbio user's guts, not by say, correlating the number of different strains of bacteria to a diversity score. So, although my diversity score is better than most users, I can't necessarily conclude that it's optimal, since for all I know, all the Gutbio users could have poor diversity and my mine is just less poor.

3. Micronutrients

This may come as a surprise to you, but you don't get all of your vitamins and minerals from just the food you eat. That's right — bacteria in your gut actually have the capability of producing vitamins, specifically B vitamins for your body.

Unfortunately, not everyone is the same, and depending on your DNA, you may produce more or less B vitamins than are necessary to maintain optimal health. In general, bacteria in your gut can produce 86% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin B6, 37% of folate, 31% of vitamin B12, and 27% of niacin.

From my results, you could probably guess that my DNA's not really helping me out when it comes to obtaining optimal amounts of B vitamins, meaning that I need to focus on getting more B vitamins from my diet, such as from organ meats and egg yolks. However, this just goes to show how valuable a test like Gutbio can be since, without testing your microbiome, there's really no other way to know if the bacteria in your gut are doing their job.

4. Short-Chain Fatty Acids

Another valuable biomarker that Gutbio tests for is short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) status. What are SCFAs? SCFAs are fatty acids that are six or fewer carbons long, which are produced through the fermentation of carbohydrates, including resistant starches, by bacteria in the gut.

So what's the deal with SCFAs anyway? Well, SCFAs have multiple roles in the human body including:

Acting as an energy source and helping our metabolism by improving blood lipid levels, increasing satiety, and increasing sensitivity to insulin
Acting as a signaling molecule in the nervous system, among other systems
Helping prevent the absorption of toxic compounds
Increasing nutrient circulation
Inhibiting the growth of pathogens
Stimulating the growth of beneficial bacteria
Maintaining a healthy pH
Improving gut-immune capacity

As you can see, there's plenty of benefits to having optimal SCFA levels. Unfortunately, there are also several factors that can negatively impact your SCFA status, including:

Lack of microbial diversity due to diet
Inflammation in the gut
History of chronic antibiotic use
Decreased consumption of fiber

Two of the more important SCFAs to pay close attention to include butyrate and propionate. For starters, butyrate (or butyric acid) is a 4-carbon SCFA found most commonly in dairy products. It has several important roles, including its ability to act as the primary energy substrate used by colonic enteric cells, accounting for roughly 70% of their energy demands. Aside from it's main benefit, butyrate has also been shown to upregulate brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the brain as well as act as a reliable source of fuel for the brain where it can replace sugar.

To continue, propionate is a 3-carbon SCFA found in the gut. Like butyrate, its main benefit is its ability to act as an energy source for colonic enteric cells. However, other benefits of propionate include its ability to act as a precursor for gluconeogenesis as well as its anti-inflammatory effects.

Clearly, you can see that SCFAs are necessary for optimal health, and just like with micronutrients, knowing whether you're lacking optimal levels of SCFAs is fairly difficult without a microbiome test like Gutbio. However, that's not all Gutbio tests for as you see with the last set of measurements — probiotics and pathogens.

5. Probiotics & Pathogens

I decided to group probiotics and pathogens into one final section because unlike the previous measurements we looked at, knowing whether you possess or lack a probiotic or pathogen doesn't provide you with much insight into your habits beyond knowing that you need to take action on that specific strain. More specifically, knowing your inflammation, diversity, micronutrient, or SCFA status can provide insights into how you should be adjusting your diet, exercise, or other lifestyle factors. However, with probiotics and pathogens, Gutbio simply tells you whether you possess or lack either of them, which you can fix by, say, simply taking a probiotic strain to increase the number of that probiotic in your gut, or by beginning a protocol to eliminate an existing pathogen.

For probiotics, there's two family strains in particular I think you should pay most attention to — the Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus families. Why? Well, just like the SCFAs I focused on, both of these families yield the largest amounts of benefits for your health. For starters, the Bifidobacterium family is the most predominant "friendly" bacteria in your gut and are the first microbes to colonize the intestinal tract of an infant. On top of that, the Bifidobacterium species can crowd out pathogenic ("bad") bacteria by competing for binding sites on the walls of the intestines. On the flip side, low levels of Bifidobacterium have been found in individuals with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), particularly those with diarrhea.

As for the Lactobacillus family, this family contains lactic acid producing bacteria that have beneficial effects in the human GI tract. Aside from this benefit, they're very similar to the Bifidobacterium family, making up a large portion of the beneficial bacteria that inhabit our intestines as well as protecting the body from invading pathogenic bacteria.

Finally, possessing any pathogen can be problematic, so it's always good to know what specific pathogen may be invading your gut in order to determine the most effective protocol to eliminate it. Nevertheless, both of my results show that I have optimal amounts of beneficial probiotic strains and that I'm free and clear of any notable pathogens, which if anything, is just a nice sanity check for me.

Summary

So there you have it — the best measurements and takeaways from Onegevity's Gutbio test. Now, like I said, this isn't every measurement that comes in your Gutbio report, but I do believe these are the most valuable measurements that you can take significant action on to ultimately improve your health. If you're interested in checking out the rest of the measurements in my Gutbio report or just want to dive even deeper into the nitty gritty details, feel free to download my full report down below. Happy testing!