Change - The Chopra Foundation

The Planetary Biome: A New Theory of Life and Survival

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

The global pandemic has disrupted everything we call normal life. The disruption has been so catastrophic that there is fear among experts that this is only a “starter pandemic.” COVID is less infectious than the measles and less fatal than SARS. Instead of using this fact to stoke fear, we can do a great deal to heed COVID’s wakeup call.

A new way of looking at life itself holds out hope and optimism, because the popular image of deadly viruses assaulting humans like microscopic aliens is incorrect. Microbes are the very basis of life. We interact with them constantly, and much more than 99% of the time life is enhanced. Every advanced life form, including us, has microbial DNA woven into its own genome. A vast colony of bacteria known as the microbiome together with viruses (the virome) and fungi (the mycobiome) that inhabit every animal’s digestive tract, and when it comes to mammals, the microbiome not only makes digestion possible, but it connects us to the planetary biome—the totality of viruses, bacteria, and fungi that truly rules the earth.

It is a very benign rule. Look around at the astonishing diversity of life that evolution has produced. Evolution in higher life forms is the visible outcome of activity in the planetary biome. To keep the creation of new life beneficial, as it has been for billions of years, the first lesson of the new model is to realize that we are life itself. Our actions affect Nature directly in ways that either enhance life or lead it into destructive patterns.

If we look at COVID as a response, or even a message from the planetary biome, what is the message about? It is about disruption and imbalance. The microbial world responds quickly, at times instantly, to aberrant conditions. Fortunately, it can also respond quickly to rebalance itself, since balance is the natural tendency of every level of life.

Human beings are responsible for imbalance and disruption in many ways, most of them the product of modern life. We can begin with viruses. The earth has a global virome, which is currently being mapped at Stanford. This Earth database, once completed, which also allow us to identity the viruses in the human virome.

As in the human virome (and the microbiome and mycobiome), there can be dysbiosis, when one microbe goes out of balance and becomes opportunistic, amplifying itself at the expense of others. On a larger scale, humans, among all mammalian species, are being opportunistic as we remove forests and wetlands and pollute the land and oceans, leading to an unprecedented rate of extinction of species.

The novel COVID virus was most likely introduced into humans from other mammals as we insist on eating food from species that are too close to our genetic makeup (a notorious example being China’s so-called wet markets). By design in our evolution, the human microbiome prefers plants (our teeth, stomach acid, colon structure, and our need for plant fiber to feed our gut microbiome all support this conclusion).

The consumption of animals, especially mammalian species that are genetically more similar to humans, leads to putrefaction and microbial dysbiosis. As we make ourselves sick, we also propagate the production of opportunistic bacteria that disrupt the earth’s microbiome. Through the same meat diet we also propagate viruses and fungi that disrupt the earth’s virome and mycobiome. Our disruption extends to inducing and accelerating new mutations across all species on Earth with increasing levels of pollution at the chemical, electromagnetic, and radioactive levels.

As essential as electricity is to modern life, our pollution-generating activities accelerate mutation in ourselves as well as in life forms below us. We, and the planet as a whole, are healthiest when we create maximal evolutionary and genetic distance in our food chains. “Genetic distancing” is now needed more than ever. Otherwise, our many activities that pollute the earth first accelerate the introduction of new mutations in viruses and bacteria in ourselves and in other mammals (we aren’t the only species susceptible to COVID, for example). Then we eat these other mammals and disrupt our own microbiomes with new infections, some of which are potentially fatal.

The message from the pandemic won’t be received immediately or completely understood and accepted. But hope arises because the planetary biome is the true foundation of life and the ecology that entangles all living things. Humans are the pivot point, now and in the future. We are the mirror of the earth and of life itself. A conscious alliance with the evolutionary gifts of the biome opens the way for a future free of pandemics and many disorders that can be treated from the microbial level on up to cells, tissues, and the whole person. The potential in medicine alone is enormous. What we need to do now is to take this new model seriously and to learn how best of live as part of the planetary biome.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi is the Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chair of Neurology and Co-Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi has discovered numerous Alzheimer’s disease genes, including the first one, and is developing new Alzheimer’s therapies using human mini-brains pioneered in his laboratory. Dr. Tanzi has published 600 research papers, received numerous awards and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He has also co-authored several books, including “Decoding Darkness” and three bestsellers with Deepak Chopra: “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”. In his spare time, he plays keyboards with guitarist, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and other musicians.

What It Takes to Live in the Present Moment

By Deepak Chopra,^TM MD

The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupt normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at the same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

If you break the whole thing down, the difference is between a temporary experience of the present moment and a constant, unbroken experience. The now is either sometimes or all the time. Sometimes is what all of us experience, those passing moments of bliss, love, beauty, etc. I’d argue that these privileged experiences come and go of their own accord. They are as unpredictable as your next thought.

This doesn’t preclude working on yourself to expand your awareness through meditation and yoga, going inside to heal old wounds, rising yourself of self-judgment, and all the other things people do in the human potential movement. If you are stuck in worry, depression, fear of aging and death, and other kinds of stuckness that create pain and suffering, then finding a way out is absolutely necessary.

But no amount of personal work is going to change “sometimes” to “all the time.” The healthiest, happiest, sanest person in the world doesn’t necessarily live in the present moment, because the present moment is timeless. No matter how expensive our Rolex is, it doesn’t tell the timeless. To be in the present moment all the time requires a shift in identity, which can be specified as follows:

“I am me, a separate person” changes to “I am,” without reference to a separate person.
“I am here in this location” changes to “I am unbounded and have no location.”
“I am young (or old or middle-aged)” changes to “I have no sense of time passing.”
“I want” changes to “I am without desires, fulfilled in myself.”

If there was a mechanism like a car’s gear shift to handle these changes, we would be machines ourselves. But in reality, the “I” that wants to live in the present is a mysterious creation of the mind, which itself is a mysterious creation of God-knows-what (insert any theory you want here, religious or secular), and the God-knows-what transcends everyday life. The normal approaches we take to explain “I” unfortunately were constructed by “I,” and therefore there’s a true Catch-22. If “I” investigates itself with the intention of going beyond “I,” the result is simply to reinforce “I,” making sure it sticks around. Giving your ego the project of going beyond the ego won’t succeed, because all you’ve done is add another project to a self that undertakes a hundred other projects (work, family, relationships sex, hobbies, vacations, gossip, and keeping up with the news are only the beginning).

In my forthcoming book, Total Meditation, I offer a way to escape this Catch-22. It begins with the idea that the whole bodymind is naturally set up to live in the present. When it is subjected to stress, the body adapts temporarily until the stress subsides, and then it returns to a dynamic state of balance known as homeostasis. The mind does the same thing. Between every thought or feeling, the mind returns to readiness for the next thought or feeling. This state of readiness is just as balanced as homeostasis. But we fail to notice it because we are entirely focused on mental activity rather than mental silence.

Yet silence is only a superficial clue. In a stressful world peace and quiet acquire a special value. But in reality, the state of readiness is the source of everything we value in our lives. Love, bliss, compassion, creativity, and insight all have the same origin in pure, unbounded awareness. The whole bodymind has the same source. Knowing this, you can consciously return to the readiness state the minute you notice that you aren’t in it.

This openness to let your mind regain its balance is the key to total meditation. Unlike occasional meditation, which requires a set time every day that needs to be set aside, total meditation keeps up with our life from moment to moment. You always keep your eye on the prize, which is to live from your source. There’s no struggle or effort involved. You simply allow your mind to obey its own nature.

There’s much to say about this topic, but when it comes to living in the present moment, total meditation changes “sometimes” to “all the time.” The beauty of such an approach is that you experience change with the support of existence itself. To be here now looks like some kind of deep spiritual challenge. In reality it is just the opposite. Living in the present moment involves a state of awareness that the mind gravitates toward if you leave it alone and let the nature of the mind be what it is. In fact, this is the secret behind all spiritual attainments. The less you try, the closer you get. One could hardly wish for a more propitious setup.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

Switching from Lifespan to Healthspan

By Naveen Jain and Deepak Chopra™, MD

Some pessimism has been circulating about lifespan recently. In the modern era lifespan has increased every decade, and dying before you turn seventy would now be considered a premature death. Three score and ten is no longer a destination for a normal life, and average lifespans among people who are not underprivileged could easily top ninety in the near future.

The difference in quality of life is now more important than lifespan on its own, because the health status of two seventy-year-olds can vary wildly. The concept to keep in mind is healthspan, defined as the years you spend without infirmity, chronic disease, and dementia. Right now healthspan is a hit and miss proposition.

While we are told that our genes determine how we age, this needs to be clarified. Research on identical twins reveals that it’s not your genes that determine your healthspan but your lifestyle, nutrition, and gut microbiome that play a much more important role. Identical twins are born with the same genes, a fact that will not change over the decades, but by age seventy, many identical twins are as unalike in their health status as two people chosen at random.

What makes the difference is known as gene expression. DNA is an inactive molecule, but its expression into active molecules (proteins), is influenced by all the factors that determine the difference between aging well or badly. The active side of genetics belongs to the field of epigenetics, which controls whether a gene is turned on or off. You carry around at the epigenetic level all the major experiences of your lifetime. As these accumulate, they automatically divide into experiences that promote a long healthspan and those that do the opposite.

Here is where a breakthrough is possible that could make an enormous difference. We said that you cannot change the genes you were born with, which has been gospel in genetics for decades. Even though you can not change the genes you are born with, you can change their expression, which is what matters. Also, 90% of your genes are not in your cells but in your gut microbiome. Trillions of bacteria in your digestive tract do more than digest food. They constitute an immense chemical factory sending messages to every part of the body. Humans have evolved in cooperation with these bacteria. They are not alien or separate from you; they are part of your evolution, affecting you every moment.

Chemical messages can be harmful, such as those that create inflammation or promote stress, or beneficial. Your microbiome is unique to you and constantly shifting. In essence, you are changing the vast majority of your genes through your lifestyle, for the gut microbiome amounts to 90% of your genes. The genes you were born with amount to only 10% of your total genome. The good news here is that you can change their expression, also.

Healthspan, therefore, depends on living in such a way that the entire genetic complement functions properly. The enemies of beneficial gene expression are now pretty well known:

Impure water, air, and food
Lack of hygiene and sanitation
Stress
Chronic inflammation
Depression and anxiety
Toxins like alcohol and tobacco
Sedentary lifestyle
Inherited predisposition (normally a minor factor if you are healthy)

These negative factors take years to develop before symptoms appear and a doctor must be visited. In the meantime, people shorten their healthspan simply through everyday choices. It’s the small things accumulating over a long time that determine who is healthy at seventy and who isn’t. Similarly, the choices that support the best functioning at the cellular level are well know.

Pure food, water, and air
Absence of additives and toxins
Moderate physical activity
Meditation
Lowered stress
Good level of mood
Close fulfilling relationships
Having a good support system
Overall happiness and well-being

These influences go far beyond preventive medicine and depending on a doctor to keep you healthy. You can lower your biological age by the choices you make, and your entire complement of genes will benefit. They express the benefit by exchanging chemical messages that promote their own lives at the cellular level. Those messages are chemical and therefore do not speak in the language humans share. But every aspect of consciousness, going beyond the physical, lies at the heart of healthspan.

That’s why a direct connection can be made between meditating, even for a short period, and the level of telomerase in your cells. Telomerase is a chemical that is vital to keeping DNA intact without fraying from age. It took years of intense research to uncover the role of telomerase, yet the bottom line is that your consciousness, not just your positive lifestyle choices, is key to what your cells are doing, including the one-celled microbes in your intestinal tract.

More importantly, however, is the message that healthspan should be everyone’s top priority when thinking about present and future health. What makes you young and keeps you young is the healthy functioning, right this minute, of your cells and microbiome. How do you actually know that your lifestyle is contributing towards healthy aging or in other words are you biologically becoming younger or older than your chronological age. Viome is a company that recently launched a health intelligence service that gives you insight into your microbial health, cellular health, immune system health, mitochondrial health, stress response health and your biological age. For fair disclosure authors are founders and advisor to Viome. Your microbiome are living solely for your benefit, and by giving them some attention in return, you are caring for your future far beyond what a doctor can do after symptoms appear.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

Naveen Jain is the founder of Viome and many other successful companies. Viome’s Health Intelligence service assesses your gut microbiome health, cellular health, mitochondrial health, immune system health, and your stress response health. Viome can even reveal your biological age. Naveen is the author of the award-winning book Moonshots– Creating the World of Abundance, has been awarded E&Y “Entrepreneur of the Year”, and “Most Creative Person” by Fast Company.

Energy Healing Comes into the Light

By Deepak Chopra™, MD, Tiffany Barsotti, MTh, Paul J. Mills, PhD

When faced with traditional healing systems outside the Western tradition, science looks askance. That was true when traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, and Ayurveda from India began to be known a generation ago. Popular acceptance doesn’t budge these prejudices, but if there’s a crossover with accepted Western concepts, the chances improve.

This is currently happening with energy healing, because it has a crossover with a proven phenomenon, the human body’s faint electrical field, known as the biofield. This field is composed of the emission of electricity and biophotons, which are the light naturally emitted by all living things, and yet no one has scientifically established the use of the biofield. Into this gap steps energy healing, which looks to the body’s subtle energy field as something both crucial and vital for balanced health and wellbeing. At its most basic, the notion behind energy healing is that the biofield of a sick person is out of balance, and balance can be restored by directly treating the biofield.

Energy healing has ancient roots. Today it is most commonly recognized through modalities such as Healing Hands (from Native American traditions) and Therapeutic Touch. Their aim is something like removing the static from a radio signal; the practitioner is removing dissonance and restoring resonance in the biofield. Needless to say, energy healing and the biofield remain highly controversial when considering Western ideas of the body and the practice of medicine.

But before decrying another outbreak of pseudoscience, there is serious, well-controlled research to consider. Despite not yet having scientific instruments to measure how the biofield might respond to a particular energy healing practice, studies have proceeded to examine their potential use under real-world conditions, such as in a clinic setting, and typically going head-to-head with standard therapy.

One of the first methodologically sound placebo-controlled trials of an energy healing modality examined the effects of an energy chelation therapy (as taught by Rev. Rosalyn L. Bruyere) on chronic fatigue in breast cancer survivors. In the journal Cancer, the official journal of the American Cancer Society, findings showed that study participants who received energy healing over a four-week period had statistically significant and clinically relevant reductions in their chronic fatigue. (The study also found that the placebo control, which was called “mock healing”, also led to a reduction in fatigue, although not as significantly as the real energy healing technique.)

Interestingly, there was an independent effect of belief, i.e., the type of treatment the study participants believed themselves to be having had an independent effect on their quality of life. A waiting list of breast cancer survivors showed no changes in their fatigue. In addition, the healing-energy group showed a significant restoration in their daily levels of the hormone cortisol, which is typically flattened in chronically fatigued breast-cancer survivors.

To date and despite mainstream skepticism, there have been numerous scientific studies of healing energy using accepted scientific methods. They have demonstrated significant beneficial effects, the majority of which focusing on anxiety, depressed mood, and pain. More broadly, other disciplines are seeking to understand the biofield from the perspective of the physical sciences, and how the biofield relates to consciousness (given that the brain is the most prominent area of electrical activity in the body).

Circling back to the quest to develop scientific instruments to reliably measure the biofield, Tiffany J. Barsotti and Paul J. Mills recently reviewed dozens of such devices, pointing out their merits and shortcomings and providing guidance on next steps in the field. One device, the Bio-Well, uses Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) to assess the body’s energy system as related to physical, emotional, and mental conditions. The Bio-Well device captures photon emissions using the Su Jok hand meridian system from Korean medicine and maps these emissions to the organ systems of the body.

Disclosures. Tiffany J. Barsotti is an educator and distributor of the Bio-Well device.

The Bio-Well captures the biofield as energy and information penetrating throughout the body. Knowing that the biofield is both inside and outside our bodies, what is needed next are devices that can reliably visualize and map it for therapeutic purposes. When the day comes that scientific instruments can successfully map and quantify the totality of the human biofield, it could be a game-changer for medical science and more broadly for Western scientific thought. We are already on the threshold of redefining what we mean by the body and how it miraculously functions.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

Rev. Tiffany Barsotti, M.Th., is an internationally renowned medical intuitive, spiritual healer, and a clinician and researcher of subtle energy, biofield therapies and energy psychology. With her spiritual and intuitive guidance, she serves as an integrative practitioner working alongside physicians and other allied health professionals. She received her Masters of Theology in Energy Medicine with special emphasis in Medical and Spiritual Counseling from Holos University Graduate Seminary and was personally mentored by the school’s founders, Drs. C. Norman Shealy and Caroline Myss. Tiffany is a visiting scholar at the University California at San Diego. To advance her clinical and research activities, Tiffany utilizes Biofield devices to measure the human Biofield and Subtle Energy interactions related to mind-body mechanisms.

Paul J. Mills is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. He is Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems. In the early 1980s, he published some of the initial scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others.

Your Microbiome: The Most Promising Facts

By Naveen Jain and Deepak Chopra™, MD

It is fair to say that the exploration of the microbiome has turned out to be the most exciting prospect in medicine since the discovery of DNA. Most people have at least heard the term “gut microbiome,” which applies to the trillions of microbes, chiefly bacteria, that live in the human digestive tract. Awareness has risen to the point that taking probiotics—over-the-counter additives of microbes to supplement and balance the gut microbiome—has become a global $5 billion-dollar market.

We’ve reached the point, after a decade of intense investigation, where the ABCs of the microbiome are known. These facts provide the groundwork for what you can do, or cannot do, to improve your own gut microbiome (the word “gut” is necessary because we have multiple microbiomes in our mouth, groin, and armpits as well as over the surface of our skin).

Here are some basic facts and the positive implications of each:

Every person’s microbiome is unique.
Positive implication: Individual diets can be tailored to promote the best bacterial activity in your diet.
Hundreds and perhaps thousands of different species of bacteria inhabit the gut microbiome. As part of a teeming community that is involved in digesting your food, some bacteria are beneficial, some are not.
Positive implication: It is possible to potentially increase the beneficial bacteria and decrease the harmful ones.
Through direct chemical signals sent to the immune system, the gut microbiome has a strong, perhaps the strongest, influence on your immune status.
Positive implication: All types of diseases, including cancer and the major chronic diseases of modern life (obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension), might be prevented and possibly cured through maintaining a healthy gut microbiome.
Diet is seen as the most powerful way to change your gut microbiome, since each bacterial species feeds on specific foods.
Positive implication: Without any kind of medication, a healthy microbiome should be sustainable through proper diet alone.

You can see why the microbiome has provoked so much promise and excitement. As positive as these facts are, however, they are also very general. At present there are hundreds of studies on the gut microbiome that have reached no consensus, so the whole field remains in flux.

Here are the major issues that need to be resolved.
There is no ideal microbiome and therefore no ideal diet. Much seems to depend on the individual. Even inside one person the community of micro-organisms is incredibly complex.

Studies show that indigenous peoples around the world have much richer gut microbiomes than in developed countries. This depletion of our microbiome has some researchers worried, but no conclusion has been reached.

With so many issues still up in the air, what can you reliably do to maintain a healthier microbiome? In your colon, the food that nourishes you isn’t what nourishes your microbiome. It feeds largely on fiber, of which there are many kinds. But essentially fiber is from vegetables, grains, and legumes. Those foods are considered “prebiotic,” meaning that they are the building blocks that the microbiome needs. A diet rich in prebiotics would include a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, grain, and nuts. This is far more important than taking a probiotic pill and buying active yogurt.

Secondly, it is now possible to test your own gut microbiome to see what is weak, deficient, or out of balance in it. To understand what such a test can tell you, we’ll delve into the biology of the gut microbiome.

Each person’s gut microbiome can produce beneficial molecules such as vitamins and short chain fatty acids (SCFAs), and it can also produce harmful molecules (e.g., lipopolysaccharides and putrescine). They key is that the production of molecules is determined by the dietary ingredients in food. The micronutrients in our food are the raw materials for specific microbiome functions. Because every person’s gut microbiome is unique, the same food given to two people can cause the microbiome of one person to produce beneficial molecules and the other person harmful molecules.

By performing functional (gene expression) tests through stool samples, each person can feed their microbiome exactly what it needs to produce lots of beneficial molecules rather than the harmful ones. Presently the only such RNA (functional) microbiome test readily available is from Viome—in the interests of fair reporting, the two authors are the founder of Viome and an advisor to the company. But our larger aim is to further the practical application of microbiome research.

Let’s deepen this understanding. Your cells share a chemical language with the bacteria in your gut. They sense their environment using chemical signaling. Crucially, the immune system, senses the presence or absence of specific molecules that rigger an immune response. For example, your immune system mounts an inflammatory response if it senses the presence of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), and inflammation calms down in the presence of a different molecule, butyrate. Both LPS and butyrate can be produced by many types of bacteria under specific conditions. If we can figure out which foods a person should eat, and which ones to avoid, we can rebalance the functions of their microbiome to reduce the inflammation and chronic diseases. Because every person has a different gut microbiome, there is no one diet that is good for all people.

Only individual testing makes precise dietary recommendations possible. Your gut microbiome can be used to measure your own digestive abilities. For example, if our digestive juices are not able to process all the protein we eat, the undigested protein will make its way to the colon, where certain microbes can convert it to putrescine or cadaverine, two harmful chemicals that deserve their morbid names. If these microbial functions (processing of undigested proteins into putrescine or cadaverine) are measured by a functional stool test, it can inform a person to reduce their protein intake.

This brings up the difference between DNA and RNA tests. Let’s say that a DNA test determines that someone’s gut microbiome has the genes that ferment undigested proteins into putrescine and cadaverine. That DNA test cannot determine if those genes are active or not (in other words, is protein fermentation actually happening?). Only an RNA test can determine if harmful protein fermentation actually takes place or not, because it measures gene activity, not just the presence or absence of the genes.

Testing is a critical step in doing the most important thing, analyzing the state of your gut microbiome, since it is unique to you. There are exciting links being made with autoimmune disorders and a person’s immune response to invading pathogens (a pressing issue during the COVID-19 pandemic). With so much suspicion being directed at inflammation and stress as the root cause of chronic illness, the gut microbiome has huge implications.

We’ve given a one over lightly of the issues involved, but the important thing is that at this very moment faith, fiction, and facts are being separated out. This is some of the best medical news one can think of.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”