December 14, 2020
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If someone asks how tall you are, it’s pretty simple to get a measuring tape and find out. And if you want to know your weight, you can step on the scale.
But if you were asked how healthy you are, you might find it more challenging to answer.
It’s hard to tell without taking a closer look at what’s going on in your body.
Your body is made from trillions of cells (not including the 100 trillion microbes that live in your gut) and consists of many interconnected systems that keep you alive. These cells and systems all send each other messages and interact with each other.
Of course, it would be impossible to look at how well every cell in our body is functioning, so we have to look at other indicators that tell us what’s going on inside of us.
For example, measuring your blood sugar response after eating gives us some information about your metabolic health.
But to understand as much as possible about how these complex systems are working and what that means for our health, we need to look beyond single measures.
That’s why at ZOE, we don’t measure just one aspect of your metabolic health to find out how healthy you are.
Our PREDICT studies look at many different aspects of metabolic health, including blood sugar, blood fat, and microbiome profiling. This approach is known as ‘multi-omics,’ and captures a more complete picture of what is going on inside your body.
PREDICT is the world’s largest in-depth nutritional research program investigating how responses to food vary from person to person and how they impact our overall health.
Working together with experts at some of the world’s leading institutions, including King’s College London, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Stanford University, we measured millions of data points from thousands of people in both the US and UK.
Analyzing all this data is helping us to unravel the complicated relationships between the food we eat and our metabolic health.
Not only did we see that everyone has their unique biology and their responses to food, but importantly, we found that every individual’s responses were consistent and predictable.
This means that no single factor will predict your metabolic health. Rather, many different, interrelated factors - your diet, environment, gut microbiome, genes, and even sleep - all play a role.
When you take our ZOE test, you can access information about your biology and your responses to food, measuring blood sugar, blood fat, and microbiome composition in a similar way to participants that took part in our PREDICT studies.
This data gives a more comprehensive picture of your overall metabolic health than tests that assess just one of these measures and allows us to predict how you respond to any food, based on our analysis of data from thousands of study participants.
These predictions allow us to create your personalized insights and ZOE scores that work with your unique biology so you can take back control of your health and weight.
Other tests may give you food recommendations based on single factors like your genes or your microbiome alone, but we believe that this approach can miss out on a lot of vital information.
We look at your overall metabolic health and give you recommendations that work your body, so you can take control of your food choices and improve your health.
Want to learn more about your unique biology so you can make the best decisions for your health and weight? Start your ZOE journey today.
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