Health Experiment

ZOE test recap

I have recently written a blog about what ZOE is and gave the overview of the testing process. But just to recap ZOE is the nutrition programme that gives you your personal food recommendations based on your test results. They take a very holistic approach and look at your metabolism as a whole. ZOE checks how your body processes carbs, fats and what kind of microbiome you have. Based on their findings the artificial intelligence algorithm that they developed gives you personalised scores for each type of food. My previous blog talked about the test itself but in this one I will share my personal results with you.

Blood glucose results

Just to draw you a picture: I am a female in my late 20s, not obese, not overweight. I exercise regularly and eat healthy (or at least I think so). I do have some health issues however, digestive issues, Candida Albicans overgrowth. I was also lucky to get a high-risk HPV for a full bouquet. The former most likely explains why my blood glucose results were pretty bad. Here is my graph compared to thousands of other people responding to the same meal:

Probably one of the worst results ZOE have seen. My thought of comfort is that I know I did not sleep well enough the night before the test and sleep can have an impact on blood glucose control. Even taking sleep into account this result was slightly worrying to me. ZOE then gives you a grade, mine was 15 which is way lower than the average.

Thankfully these muffins were made with refined carbs and sugar. I try to eat healthy and so I did not see any more spikes of this altitude during the two weeks of wearing the sensor. Wearing the continuous glucose monitor was an insightful experience. I could notice that my blood glucose does not spike very high if I take a walk after eating. The most surprising to me was the difference between morning response and evening response to meals. I would always get glucose peaks in the evening after my dinner.

After observing this difference I decided to switch my breakfast and dinner around. So now I eat yoghurt with berries, nuts and seeds in the evening and a higher-carb meal in the morning.

Another shocker came when I was exercising intensely. My glucose spiked and then went down very quickly. I am not sure what to make of it…

I got quite addicted to my phone during that experiment. I would always go and check the app to see how it is going. Unfortunately (and most likely because I like long showers) the sensor did not last the full 14 days as was promised. It lasted about 10 days and then the results got very strange, it was clear it was not working as intended and so I took it off. From the reviews of other ZOE users it looks like ZOE can offer a replacement if this happens but I did not bother. I have learnt everything I needed by that point.

Blood lipids (fat) results

Well, at least my blood fat results looked much more positive:

And again, they give you the grade and mine was 76, which is great for my gender and age:

Microbiome results

Next, the most exciting part. My personal favourite – the microbiome. Despite eating a variety of plants my diversity result was not great but that could be to do with the fact that I used antifungals and antimicrobials in the past trying to resolve the Candida Albicans issue (not using them anymore because they did not help).

I am really hoping to bring this to over 100 next time I test my microbiome. ZOE offers retesting 4 months after following the personalised nutrition programme.

On the other hand, my relative abundance of good vs bad bacteria was actually good:

ZOE has performed a research on over 1000 individuals prior starting this business and showed that there are 15 good ‘bugs’ strongly associated with good health and metabolism and 15 ‘bad’ bugs strongly associated with poor health. This balance score that you see is based on the amount of these bugs.

They even check your microbiome for this particular beneficial parasite called Blastocystis which I unfortunately did not have:

There is a lot more detail on gut microbes that ZOE provides, it gives you a list of all microbes they have found in your test sample and compare their amount with the average that they have observed in others. This is one of the best gut microbiome tests that I have done so far. The improvement I would suggest is to also test the mycobiome which is Candida Albicans and other yeast species for the full picture.

Check out my other posts where I have tried various gut microbiome tests and find out if there are ZOE alternatives 😉

Food grades

After your results are analysed ZOE calculates personalised scores for a huge amount of food for you. In my case, most of the high-carb foods were marked as bad because of my poor blood glucose score. But barley, wholewheat and most of the legumes have high scores for me because they do not cause significant blood glucose spikes. This is how it looks in the app:

I personally found the app very thought-through, easy to use and the process of finding recipes or assembling your own is very straight-forward. I now try to log my diet there every day and try to keep my food score above 75. ZOE calculates your total calories and macronutrients as well. I have been tracking my fibre consumption and trying to keep it high.

My feedback so far

I could not cover everything in one blog, there are lessons, recipes and various recommendations that ZOE offers but I have highlighted the most important things that can hopefully help you make a decision about whether to do this test or not. In my previous blog I talked about the costs, do not forget about the 10% discount when your order it!

I personally quite like ZOE so far. It has been an interesting experience to learn about my body’s metabolism. It is also quite useful to have food scores and a great app where I can log my diet every day with minimal effort. There are however things that could be done better:

1. I wish ZOE had more focus on gastrointestinal issues, diarrhoea, constipation, IBS etc.
2. I hope ZOE will look at mycobiome in the future (i.e. Candida Albicans, other Candida species, yeasts)
3. I would like to see more research into how specific foods affect each microbe.

Although there is always room for improvement I believe ZOE is currently at the forefront of understanding how our body metabolism and microbiome work together. If you found this post helpful please like it, share it and subscribe to my blog to learn more about gut health, microbiome, health trackers and tests. I am experimenting with what is available out there and I hope my experience can be helpful to others who are struggling!

Always sharing,

Health Experiment