The Heallist Podcast
Heallist is on a mission to empower holistic healers, one story at a time. Join founder and serial entrepreneur Yuli Ziv as she connects with inspiring voices in alternative healing who’ve achieved true abundance, while also providing practical insights into building a conscious business. Whether you're deep into business expansion or looking to take your healing practice online, tune in every other week for new episodes and insights and visit Heallist.com to explore our tools.
The Heallist Podcast
AI & personalization in holistic health with Luca Cuccia
Explore how AI is transforming holistic health with Luca Cuccia, founder and CEO of Injoy. In this episode, Luca shares his personal journey of overcoming health challenges and his groundbreaking work in gut healthcare. Learn how AI is revolutionizing health data management, empowering practitioners with better insights, and freeing up more time for compassionate, patient-centered care.
Dive into the impact of AI in gut health, personalized wellness solutions, and how practitioners can integrate AI tools while maintaining the human touch in medicine. If you're curious about the future of holistic health and technology, this is a must-listen!
Check out Heallist.com for digital tools created just for holistic healers.
Welcome to the Healist Podcast, where we inspire and guide healers through business expansion. We give voice to incredibly abundant healers to share their stories. We dive into the quantum field to unlock the energies of conscious creation. We also develop digital tools to help you grow, which you can find on healistcom. I'm your host, Yuli, and I'm grateful you chose to join this space. Now let's go deep.
Yuli:Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another incredibly insightful episode of the Healist Podcast. I'm really, really thrilled about having this conversation about AI and holistic health, and I couldn't pick a better guest. Today we have the incredibly smart Luca Cuccia, who is the founder and CEO of Enjoy, a health tech startup revolutionizing God Healthcare through AI and microbiome science. After battling cancer at age of five and later experiencing inflammation issues himself, he made it his mission to help others facing similar challenges. A McGill University graduate in pharmacology and therapeutics, he was selected for the Techstars Montreal AI program and named among Quickback's top 25 emerging entrepreneurs. Under his leadership, enjoy has developed an advanced microbiome testing platform and gut chat and AI-powered health assistant, and he's emerging as a thought leader in the gut health space through collaborations with Olympic athletes and documentary films.
Yuli:I'm just so thrilled to have Luca here with us and to shed light on this very important topic that keeps everyone busy these days and wondering about our future of humanity. But we're here to talk about the benefits or how actually AI can help advance holistic health, and this is my intention for this episode to really maybe give a new perspective to people, especially to a lot of holistic healers that might not be familiar with AI or have some different misconceptions about it. I love sharing stories how people actually use some of those new tools to advance humanity and our health. So, luca, welcome to the podcast.
Luca:Thanks so much for having me Glee.
Yuli:So I would like to dive just right in, right, as per usual. So I think it's such a big topic and I love to learn later on about your journey and how you got into it, because it sounds just so fascinating. But give us a quick overview of AI and holistic health. What does it mean exactly? What is happening these days, and then maybe later, how can we explore more about your technology and how you're using it for your incredible product?
Luca:Beautiful, yeah, happy to. So I think AI is one of those things that when I first got into the space in 2019, it was already kind of a buzzword, but this was the pre-large language model period, right. So when people thought of AI, they thought of AI in terms of how do we use it to speed up processes that we already have? How do we apply AI to big data sets to understand information that might be hiding in there, less so what we have today, where AI can be used to write an email for someone at home, it can be used to come up with a workout plan, come up with the diet plan, come up with all these different things. Ai was certainly in its infancy, and the way that we first began to approach it was how do we look at the microbiome, which is this massive, massive, massive area of information, and use it to essentially distill down how someone is doing, are they inflamed, are they sick, are they healthy? So that's how we use AI, but what I would say more broadly in terms of AI when it applies to holistic health, is that practitioners today are becoming more and more responsible for a wide variety of areas of health for their clients and their patients.
Luca:You know the past of having specialized care in areas of exclusively gastroenterology, exclusively psychiatry and mental health exclusively in other areas is starting to be shifted, where now we have functional medicine practitioners, holistic practitioners, who are been around for decades, but of course we're now becoming a bigger part of the patient journey as people are beginning to realize that my health cannot be compartmentalized into one area. You know I can't fix one area of how I'm feeling without considering my mental health and my diet simultaneously, for example. So that wider range of expertise now is where AI can be a lot more supportive. You as a practitioner aren't going to be able to be sitting with your patient or client every single day to understand their eating habits, how they're feeling, their day-to-day fluctuations and symptoms and so on. So the beauty of AI is that when you do meet with your clients, that understanding of how they've been doing in the periods between your visits can be understood from the get-go. So you can understand when you're having that conversation with this person, what has your life been like, as opposed to just asking the question how are you doing after not seeing someone for 12 months, which is kind of how care typically works now six to 12 months. So it's a really beautiful system where we can make sure knowledge isn't lost over long periods, we can summarize it into ways that are useful for delivering care and we can have these conversations with more understanding, because ultimately, technology best serves as a complement to human expertise At least that's how I see it.
Luca:It's definitely not a replacement. Ai is not replacing healthcare anytime soon, and that's with respect to what we do. We're heavily focused on enhancing care rather than replacing human capability, because we see that as a way to free up practitioners to focus on the deeper, more empathetic interactions that are so important for healthcare delivery. So, while AI can effectively handle the more routine administrative tasks, like answering general questions, checking up on people while they're away, patients fundamentally trust and need human doctors for anything involving a medical decision or even emotional health decision, because ultimately, care comes down to two things safety and trust, and I don't think of a better group of practitioners to do that, besides holistic care individuals.
Yuli:Now, I love that. What you mentioned of this idea of a holistic care right, and looking at a person as a whole and taking into account different areas of their life, their body, into account different areas of their life, their body and how much pressure does it put on a practitioner to be able to take all that information right, digest it pretty quickly into some sort of I don't want to say diagnosis, but some sort of a conclusion, right, and then provide care? So that's just to break it down as a processing task. Right, that's a big task and often in holistic care we have a little more time. Usually a typical session lasts about an hour. In traditional care it's usually 15 minutes, right, so we do have that hour, but it's still a pretty short amount of time for a practitioner to be able to digest the information and analyze it and come up with care. And I think this is such a great point for AI to come in and help solve Right.
Luca:Yeah, and I think I think a really good example when it comes to how this can be useful is for something like diet tracking. Diet tracking is notoriously difficult, it's difficult for people to do, nobody wants to do it, and then, even from the practitioner side of things, it's notoriously difficult to pull out those patterns of what the information is trying to present to you. So recognizing patterns is something that humans can do over the course of maybe one to two days, but as soon as we get to timescales that span weeks, that span months, that span years, we start to lose the fine details, and that's something that AI is really good at. So on top of that, we have this subconscious issue where we might forget or we might even become accustomed to habits which, over time, become our new regular. So in my world, I get this a lot, as you can imagine. You know people who have completely forgotten that going to the bathroom five times a day is not normal, just because for them it is. You know, for them it's been months and weeks that this has been the normal for them. So AI allows us to bring light to those inconsistencies, essentially show through tracking and recognize these issues and present them to you in ways that on a day-to-day basis you might not recognize. On a day-to-day basis you might not recognize.
Luca:Another area, for example, is within food intolerance tracking. Something like a dietary intolerance if you're eating a varied diet might not appear day-to-day, but overall you might know something's off with what you're eating and how you're feeling. Typical example we get all the time is that people say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Right, but for someone who has cerebral bowel syndrome maybe they have a sensitivity to FODMAP groups that apple could be the reason that they're experiencing bloating and abdominal pain and all these different things. But most people would never consider it.
Luca:But by being able to apply an AI to what you're eating, the symptoms you're experiencing and drawing connections between the two, we can highlight that that apple is a problem for you and it's something that you should take a look at or try removing from your diet. So recognizing patterns is a huge, huge, huge, huge area that AI can be very useful. Of course, consistent tracking is the first step, but again, ai can be used to make that even easier. Right, just taking a picture of your food as opposed to like writing it down in a journal, or if you do write in a journal, taking a picture of that journal and turning it into data that the AI can then assess, because identifying that issue whether you're a dedicated practitioner or not is something that people are looking for, and all of this really just becomes contextualization for people who are dealing with chronic issues. Really, trying to identify any signatures in their health before they become problematic is how we see it.
Yuli:So let's double click a little bit on this idea of data tracking, because I think that's where it kind of it all starts and I still feel it's something that is a bit disconnected from our care, right? I know a lot of people track that data on their own. I'm a big some of you know I'm a big Oura Ring fan. You know that's, yes, we all it. Just, I think once you start tracking, you don't want to stop because you're just getting so much amazing useful information. You know, I've tried different microbiome tests that were also like, really eye opening. But I think a lot of those tests these days, because they're so accessibly available to people, not necessarily when I'm going and seeing a holistic practitioner, I'm not necessarily coming in with my Oura Ring data, right? So what do you see? What are some of the challenges or some of the trends that you see in this space in terms of connecting some of those tracking devices or tests, whatever it is, connecting that data basically and giving it to practitioners as a tool?
Luca:Yeah, it's an excellent question. I think a lot of the issues that we have is that our entire medical system was not designed for chronic care support. You know, it was really designed in the simplest fashion of describing and where accidents, you know, broken bones, things like this. But as soon as issues arise where repeated care is necessary, it becomes very difficult, and that's why traditional care is, you know, under so much scrutiny and why holistic care is so much more appreciated, because the whole point of it is that time is given to the individual when they come to see you. So, in terms of tracking and making that information relevant for practitioners as a whole, I think a really important aspect is connecting those pieces of information let's say, you know how you're sleeping, the amount of activity you're experiencing, body temperature, all these different data points and translating it into data that is more familiar in the practitioner world. We do the same thing when it comes to the microbiome, right? I don't expect every practitioner on the planet to know specific bacteria and what to do about them, but what we try and focus on is making sure that we translate that data into actions that they do understand. So not looking at one area of data in isolation is definitely critically important. For example, you can't look at the microbiome and ignore the other areas of health, which is, I think, a downfall of a lot of other companies that are out there. Instead, it should be looked at in the context of how you're sleeping, what you're eating, how active you are, any symptoms that you might be experiencing, because the truth is that's the information that most practitioners will understand. They understand symptoms. They understand diet. So whenever we track data whether it be asking someone to tell us how active they were the day before, how they slept, what they might have ate, symptoms that we're experiencing we always put it towards standardized metrics that any practitioner will understand. So these are more formally known as patient-reported outcome measures. They're kind of the surveys that a practitioner might go through with a patient when they speak with them.
Luca:But a lot of the data that we have, like wearables, for example, is not connected to that. So you go to your practitioner and you say, okay, look at my Oura Ring score, here's my activity score today, here's my sleep score, and so on. There's not much that can be done with that currently, just because it's not on a scale that they're familiar with, it's not in a format that they're familiar with. Something that we're really working on now is how to translate it to those scales that people are accustomed to working with, just so that it can be relevant within the context of their care.
Luca:I think it's a big issue where we have all this amazing data whether it be consistently tracked through wearable, passively tracked through steps on your phone but it doesn't really get out of wellness and I think a lot of it is a translation problem. So that's really the big area, and how we make it applicable to care is making sure that information that's being tracked whether it be in the wellness sphere, wellness wearables sphere or something else is being presented in a way that is familiar, because you know you and I both know practitioners are extremely busy. I don't fault them for not wanting to learn new things, but we can present them with new information, so long as it's in a format they're accustomed to seeing.
Yuli:Right, I think this is one of the issues that I'm seeing, just as a user. A lot of those apps and wearables, they have their own scores right that all have a different calculation as well and they're not alike. Even just comparing two different devices that measuring sleep, right One person for exact same kind of you know sleep increments and quality can get a much lower score than the other one. So there's still kind of inconsistency because a lot of those metrics, they're proprietary metrics, right, that just defined by these companies. So even if we look at the score, which is the easier right metric to translate and give to somebody, even then I found inconsistencies and my hope is maybe with AI there will be some standardization in the future.
Luca:Someone will take up on that task of you know, organizing all this data, which, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think data organization is a big part of it, because before anything can be translated into score, you have to think of it needing to be filtered to a degree. We need to bring the data to the same starting point. So, kind of like what you were saying, whether you have a Fitbit, you have an Oura Ring, you have an 8-sleep mattress, you have a Garmin watch, whatever it might be, they are still tracking the same-ish data for the most part how you're sleeping, how you're active, body temperature changes. But you're completely right, the output for that is a score. It's a number, and almost always we don't know how that number is being calculated. So an 80 on Aura might mean something completely different on Garmin, and that's not great when it comes to healthcare, where things need to be standardized to a degree in order to make comparisons and for people to know what to do next. So that type of data cleaning is certainly an excellent AI problem. That type of data cleaning is certainly an excellent AI problem, and figuring out how to again translate between tools that are out there into formats that people are used to knowing, or just helping people get access to the raw data you know how long did you sleep and so on.
Luca:The only piece that I would add there is that it's very interesting to know sticking to the sleep example example, how many hours I slept the previous night. But what I think is more valuable is to look at that over a longitudinal period and understand how that sleep has changed. Because my normal could be getting seven hours a night and that's perfectly fine for me I feel fresh, and all these things, for For someone else it might be eight plus. So the raw number only means what it means to the individual that it's coming from. So what we really need to understand is any changes at that person's level. So if I'm always sleeping seven hours and also I'm starting to sleep five, that's a huge problem.
Luca:If I'm sleeping eight hours and now I'm sleeping seven and a half, maybe it's less of a problem. So we always like to try and focus our analysis on the individual person and highlight any changes from their kind of normal baseline, as opposed to just sticking everyone into a rigid score where 100 is good, zero is bad. We make it so that your 100 is unique to you to a degree Like. The simplest example I could think of is that you know we asked you how active you were the day before. For some person, a hundred could mean running a marathon. For someone, it can mean walking across the room, right. So it's really comes down to effort and, again, making sure that those scales are easy to understand and applicable to the person they're being used for.
Yuli:Absolutely, and just give a little context to our listeners who might be new to those wearables or the personalized tests, all those things that we're really love digging into the raw data. This is part of my fun, just like going to my Aura score and clicking on the deep sleep versus REM sleep, because that's where you really start getting insights and that's where you can really adjust your lifestyle by just realizing, for example, for me, strength training at night, right before sleep, dramatically multiplies my deep sleep score. Don't ask me why, but my body just goes into deep sleep right after some not too vigorous but some training. So this was one example that I've adjusted just by looking at the raw data, because if I was just looking at the score I would never kind of realize that. But it is helpful and I can see, for even like holistic practitioner just you know, yes, starting to use this data and like double clicking and trying to understand what is part of the score and because if a person, for example, is getting like very low REM sleep, right, it's going to affect probably their brain function. We know that at this point there's a certain minimum that we all need. So how can you help them highlight that An average person would never know that unless they really research what REM means and how does it impact their brain, so they can be that bridge right that tells them.
Yuli:And another example that I wanted to give from my personal just experiments, just, you know, doing the microbiome test, and I want to talk more about your tests and how that works because it's really it's such a fascinating topic but the one I've done, what I did when I received my scores and yes, it was like the whole report of million metrics and bacterias and things like I don't even understand what they are, but the great insights where there was actually actionable steps in it, and the scores that highlighted certain areas. So, for example, in my case, it highlighted that metabolic health was, you know, got the lowest score. So I knew, as an educated patient and I feel like we all have to be these days right this is also empowerment conversation, not just for practitioners but for anyone that you know there's so much data you can access these days. So once I saw that metabolic health score, what I did?
Yuli:I went to my holistic practitioners and multiples right that I'm using for different areas and I gave them this information and I said you know, I come to you. I've highlighted this issue of metabolic health. What can you do for me? And there was a combination of herbs and, you know, vibrational medicine that I'm taking. Now that is totally changing it Right, but, but I think so. So there's two sides of it One, empowering people to actually use this data when they go to holistic practitioners, but also for holistic practitioners to be aware that there might be data that they are not aware of that could really help their job right.
Luca:Yeah, I think that's huge. Coming back to like uncovering patterns in your health that you might not realize is a big one. I've been wearing an Oura ring for at least four years maybe even longer than that and I can tell you I got it because I knew I have trouble sleeping. That's always been something that I've had an issue with growing up, so I wanted to understand again. Similar to you, yuli, I'm a very data-driven person. I wanted to see the objective side of things, outside of just my mental how I'm thinking, I'm experiencing things, and for me, what was really cool is, in the same way, that you were able to identify okay, if I do weight training before sleep, I sleep excellently. For me, it was identifying the things that are impacting my sleep negatively, that are impacting my sleep negatively. So I think over the span of several weeks, I started to look at the data and look at the raw data as the main source of information, and very quickly I was able to tell if I eat like a decently large meal within three hours of going to sleep. My sleep is going to be restless. I'm probably going to take longer to fall asleep. I won't go into deep or REM sleep as early as I typically would, compared to if I, let's say, fast for at least four hours before I go to sleep depending on the size of the meal, of course my sleep is drastically, drastically, drastically different. Similar experience for alcohol. I'm not a big drinker in general, but I know, if I do have a drink or two and then I fall asleep within an hour of that or two significantly lower heart rate variability and so on. Even if I exercise during the day, the days where I'm able to work out whether it be a hike or I go to the gym or something at home heart rate is 20 to 30% higher in those evenings as opposed to the days that I don't. I think the tricky part there is that Aura didn't tell me that I still had to piece things together, which is one of the areas that I'm surprised wearables just haven't improved on.
Luca:I don't know if it's just a accountability issue you know they don't want to say something and be wrong about it, but for us, you know we're heavily focused on that in our work. That we do because we see the confidence you can get from it. Like for me, it's like I know. You know, if I do these things I'm going to sleep pretty, pretty well tonight, and that same type of feeling, that same confidence in your body, is what we want people to experience that are dealing with chronic health issues. Right, because I think there's a lot of conversation around suffering in silence, especially when, let's say, it comes to digestive health or gut health issues, Because it's not like you're missing a limb, it's not like you're losing your hair.
Luca:These are things that people, for unjust and just reasons I don't blame anyone for their perspectives just might not realize. So the example of you coming to dinner and not being able to eat everything because you know it's going to cause you issues, and people just saying, oh, what's the big problem? You know, just have it. Especially around the holidays, that tends to be an issue for people. But being able to confidently say I can't eat this because I know that it's going to impact my symptoms I have the data to show it, as well as my own personal experiences that I can show is really really powerful for people own personal experiences that I can show is really really powerful for people, and we've had countless of people who have taken our tests and have used our app and said that the information that we were able to uncover for them was exactly what they needed to then go see their practitioner with confidence and advocate for themselves at the base level. So I think providing confidence for people, feeling like they understand what their body's trying to tell them, and getting to the point where your data is being used to support your health goals, is a really, really important level that we want.
Luca:I think the main thing is to make sure that you're keeping your own thoughts in check as you're looking at all this data, because it can easily make you go crazy at the same time if you become too data obsessed.
Luca:So the one practice that I always recommend to everyone that I know is that even before I look at my wearable data in the morning because I still religiously, I check it every single morning after all these years, for better or worse I always try and think of how I actually feel first, how do I feel my rest was, how do I feel like I slept? How refreshed do I feel? Before I look at my aura score, because I think it's very easy to get into the pattern of not really thinking about it and letting all of your feelings be directed by those numbers, if I wake up feeling great and then my sleep score is 60, I still feel great, so I don't have to worry about it, but I think it's because I took a moment to reflect on it before then. So I think there's always a balance between data and being data obsessed and then actually making sure that it's supporting your well-being as opposed to kind of being the bane of your existence. Yeah, absolutely.
Yuli:Like mental health around the personal health data. That would be the next frontier. No, but you know what? But it's funny that you mentioned that, because it happened to me also that I would get like a super low scores and I would wonder, but at the end there was always something. I would find out that it was some lingering virus or something that my body was battling at that point that I just wasn't aware of, which is a great thing.
Yuli:Our bodies go through so much on a daily basis, so it was a good thing. But it also kind of forced me to respect that and say, okay, I'm going to be more gentle today because I don't know what it is, but my body's going through some stuff. So but yes, it's a really good point. And I wanted to dig more into what you're doing with microbiome, because it's such a new frontier, it's such an incredible, totally underrated topic that only now I feel like people coming up with all this evidence, how much impact that it creates not just on our physical body but our emotional bodies as well, and so it's incredibly important research and I feel like you're on a really on a front lines of getting this all this amazing like scientific research and all this data from your users. So I would like for you first to explain what it actually does in simple terms so our listeners can understand, and then dig more into how utilizing all this incredible data to help people.
Luca:Yeah, a lot to get into there, and I think that the easiest way to think about what we do is is by understanding our philosophy right, because I think gut health has become a topic that everyone has heard of at this point, for for good reasons, for bad reasons. You know cleanses and so on. You know taking the next big trend and wherever it takes you, but I think the core of what we do is just help people realize that gut health is health. It's not just your abdominal pain, it's not just your bloat, it's your mental health, it's your immune system, it's your digestion, of course, but it's also your skin, it's your weight, it's everything, and it's something that everybody can benefit from. You know, whether you're someone dealing with an active inflammatory condition let's say you have Crohn's all the way to someone who's at the peak of their health you know an Olympic athlete just looking to optimize.
Luca:Gut health has its place across that entire you know, sick, healthy spectrum, and I think the problem that a lot of us face today in the modern world is that we're very disconnected from our bodies, which I think is kind of what we're discussing here, where wearables can help us understand some of the underpinnings of what's going on day to day. But on top of that, we have so many external stressors, right, we have processed foods that have become the norm in the diet for the high majority of people. We have antibiotic overuse, which has its own problems. We have environmental hazards, we have chronic stress and because of that, our bodies are missing out on a lot of the natural elements that they need, contributing to a lot of the widespread health issues that we see today, especially in chronic health. And on top of this, because we're so busy, because we're always running to the next thing, we don't take that time to check in with our bodies. So we've been on our own journeys, myself and Yuli as well. So being able to look into that raw data is something that is second nature to us, but I don't put that expectation on everyone.
Luca:And the sad part is that the research is showing that all these innate systems in our bodies are not isolated. You know, they have far, far reaching impacts on things like our mood and our health, more than we ever once thought. So that disconnection between us and our bodies is becoming more and more important, and some people are definitely aware of it. You know, that's kind of where the whole, I would say, biohacking revolution is coming from, but the sad part is that a lot of these people don't necessarily have the background to act on it properly. So we see people focused on taking 30 different supplements before they're even considering the fundamentals of their diet, their sleep and their stress, which I think we all know is that's going to have a much larger impact before the supplements. And if you don't address those things first, the supplements can't have their effect. So understanding the place for those things is super important.
Luca:So for us, it really all comes down to helping you understand what your body's trying to tell you. The way I like to think of what we do is that we're essentially just translators. Your body has all the information it's trying to tell you what it needs, but we're so disconnected that we don't know how to speak the language anymore. So what we really do is help people focus on those seven hours that they're typically spending in the bathroom on a weekly basis and turn that into concrete, powerful health insights using artificial intelligence, using microbiome testing, using smart sensors, because there's around 60% of people, especially adults, who are struggling with gut health issues and health issues in general, and they're experiencing symptoms but they're not able to make the leap of turn it into? What do I do next so that gut health optimization is something that we're really focused on, so that we can make gut health and health itself as natural as your daily routine, essentially?
Yuli:So, and the product itself is essentially a test right.
Luca:Yeah, the product itself is a combination of three things it's a at-home microbiome test, it's a app and it's a bathroom sensor. So the bathroom sensor is really about habit formation. Essentially, it uses Bluetooth to recognize when you go to the bathroom with your phone. We'll send you a reminder to check in with our app, and it's also able to passively track how long you're in the bathroom, how frequently you're going, which is important to get to know. And in the app you can do a lot of things. You can tell us about the symptoms you're experiencing, your diet, your mental health. You can track basically all the important areas of your well-being. But on top of that, it's also a trustworthy informational resource.
Luca:So we have a tool called Gut Chat, similar to conversational chat that you might experience in other apps, but the unique thing about ours is that it's not connected to the internet and it's actually trained on hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed academic literature. So when you ask a question, you can be very confident that the information is coming from a place of trust, something that's been reviewed by other scientists and so on, and we always make sure to cite that information so you can see the exact resources that it's coming from. On top of that, we make it really easy for you to dig into topics. So if you ask a question after a response, we'll give you some follow-up questions you can ask. You can just keep diving deeper into topics and again get that confidence in areas of your health that either might be uncomfortable to discuss with other people or you've just never known what to trust, Because when you Google it you just kind of see a slew of information everywhere.
Yuli:So education and tracking are two big things I just pause you there because I think it's a very important topic that you just touched on with the ai chat feature, and I just want to make sure that our listeners fully understood that, because you kind of isolate this data and you control the sources of this data. It's a very different and, just you know, asking Chad GBT what is this gut symptom that I'm having, right? So you created your own kind of this trusted source that, yes, people can converse and maybe sense more privacy than sharing it with, even with their practitioner, right but at the same time, they also can trust that the data and advice they get comes from trusted sources, which I think is another big issue. Kind of look back to our AI conversation. Another big issue that we're seeing is this mistrust of data, or data that is often misleading or creating misinformation.
Yuli:So I just love that idea and I wanted to emphasize and maybe, like educate right our audience on that. It is one of the use cases of AI these days and this is something that allows you to have that again trusted source and valuable information that you know, if you asked an average practitioner to remember all this incredible research right that you're able to store in this one kind of library of content that would be just impossible for an individual. But again, with AI you're able to access like countless of research and have that in your fingertips. So I just wanted to emphasize that, because it's funny how we talked today about some of those things that are so obvious, right, but like just a few years ago, you could never imagine doing that, right.
Luca:No, you couldn't, and the information comes out so quickly that even if you tried, you wouldn't be able to keep up right. So us being able to pull the information from the literature as it's coming out and distill it into a way that you can ask questions about very easily is a huge, huge, huge benefit to practitioners, not only for their own knowledge but also for their patients, right when they're away from the care. They're able to ask questions, to get responses from databases they can trust, which is super, super important, because for us, transparency in data is a really big item that we talk about a lot LLMs, these chat, gpts and so on that are out there. When you ask a question, you have no idea where it pulled that information from, and most of these tools are also not connected to the internet most of the time, but in a way that doesn't benefit them, because that means a lot of their information is outdated and because they have such a widespread amount of information, including a download of the entire internet, they don't necessarily know. You know, is this random blog correct, or is it something that is potentially giving me completely false information? We don't have that problem because all of our resources are peer-reviewed literature. So we're able to pull from the resources, we're able to see papers that are saying similar things. Papers that have less reproducibility can be ignored, for example, and we always, always cite information. We will show you the exact paper that it came from so that you can go look into it yourself deeper and again feel that confidence of the information that's there.
Luca:So being able to one-up your education is something that's super important, and then the next layer on top of that is receiving those responses, receiving those information in a way that's easily understandable, because, coming from my science background, one of the things that I never understood is that why academic literature is so difficult to read. It's written extremely dry, there's a lot of technical jargon, and it makes it so that very few people can get value from it. And that's why so much of the great information and the great resource that's happening stays in the academic sphere, because people just don't know what it's saying. And that's not. You know, even if you're a professor, you go from one department to the next. It might be like speaking another language.
Luca:So for us, it's not just being able to get access to information, but also in a format that you can easily understand, and, on top of that, with contextualization of your individual needs. If you ask about a specific bacteria, a specific probiotic, specific diet, we can give you a response from literature about all the information you need to know, but also how it's applicable to you, because we also know about your diet, we know about your symptoms. We could say this looks like it could be useful for you because of what you're eating, because the symptoms you're experiencing, and just become so much more relevant as a result of that. So personalization is another key area that AI can be supportive of.
Yuli:Amazing. Well, thank you for this incredible overview and I can believe it's been. We're running out of time. There's so many more questions that I want to ask you, but as to kind of wrap things up for because I think we gave a lot of information to people, what can practitioners do today? What are kind of the most immediate things that they can start incorporate into their practice whether it's data, ai, different tools just to get more access to this valuable information and enhance their services?
Luca:this valuable information and enhance their services. Yeah, I think one of the most important things that people can do is use AI as something to support education. I think is a really, really big one. So being able to keep up to date on information. There's several even newsletters out there that are constantly distilling all the information from different areas of health, that are constantly distilling all the information from different areas of health that are super relevant for people to keep up with.
Luca:Down to just managing your day-to-day practice right. How do you support people better when they're not directly in front of you? Ai is going to be the best way to do that. Obviously, I'm biased. I'm going to say my products is the best thing to do that to give people confidence in their health outside of direct care. But there are many different options that go beyond simply journaling in your phone as the best option and certainly better than just Googling it to see what information might be there. So I think practitioners should definitely take the leap in understanding that AI could be a complement to their care. I've been in this space for five years. I can tell you we are nowhere near replacement, nor do I think it's ever possible, just because of the human touch, care it requires. And so, yeah, just making AI part of your practice and the way that you deliver to people.
Yuli:And considering some of those incredible products, like your test incorporating into it. We're seeing a lot of practitioners also creating partnerships with or just using it on their own by recommending some of those tests and tools to their clients because it gives them a lot more data, right, Certainly, certainly. Well, thank you so much for sharing this wall of knowledge. We didn't get to talk about your personal story because we ran out of time, so we might have to do a part two because that sounds fascinating and so much you've overcome to get here and help so many other people. So really appreciate your mission, your journey, sharing all of this incredible insights for Alyssa. Thank you so much, Luca.
Luca:My pleasure. Thanks so much, Luca, my pleasure. Thanks so much Julie.
