1043: AI-Powered Precision Nutrition, with Viome’s Dr. Guru Banavar

In Episode #1043, Dr. Guru Banavar (Founding CTO of Viome) joins Jon Krohn for a technical masterclass on the biology inside your gut. Viome has assembled what Guru calls the largest dataset on human biology ever collected, roughly 100 quadrillion nucleotides of RNA from people in more than 150 countries, and uses it to tell individuals which foods help them and which harm them. Before Viome, Guru was the first VP to lead IBM's Watson AI team, and he holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. In this episode, he explains why RNA rather than DNA holds the key to chronic disease, how a continuous-glucose study of 1,100 people became a predictive model for your blood sugar, why keto dieters come out biologically older than vegetarians, and what makes computational biology such a rare skill.

Additional materials: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.superdatascience.com/1043⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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In this episode you will learn:

• (00:09:02) Why RNA rather than DNA
• (00:21:24) The tug-of-war inside your gut
• (00:31:15) Predicting which foods spike your blood sugar
• (00:35:22) Biological age, keto diets and vegetarians
• (00:55:33) What it takes to be a computational biologist