The Health Diaries

This CEO Is Convinced a Universal Healthy Diet Doesn’t Exist

‘What’s good for one person may not be good for another person’

There are many ways to live a healthy life. The Health Diaries is a weekly series about the habits that keep notable people living well.

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur with a track record of starting companies like InfoSpace, World Innovation Institute, iNome, TalentWise, and Intelius. His one driving belief, which he’ll tell you about within moments of meeting you, is that our only limits come from our imagination.

His newest company, Viome, aims to do gut microbiome testing. Jain believes that by looking at people’s guts, scientists can build personalized action plans to fight chronic disease. He has raised $15 million in funding to support his new business.

This week, Jain tells Elemental about his obsession with reading new studies and his nontraditional view on the definition of health.

I generally get up around 4 a.m. every day. I have never in my life used an alarm clock. I jump out of bed because the light is so amazing. For me, I think that if you don’t jump out of bed at 4 a.m., you’re working on the wrong things in your life. Then I go downstairs and start with my email. I also go through research articles, and I do this for two to three hours every morning because I want to understand what happened in the world while I was sleeping.

After I take a shower, I always find at least five minutes to meditate. I don’t care how late I am running to a meeting. I need to get myself into the routine and day ahead of me.

I eat a small breakfast and I start my calls around 7:30 a.m. I’m in meetings for most of the day but I do try to carve out time for myself to catch up and have quiet. Then I can think about where we are at as a company, what we need to do, and what is important. Most of the time, we get so caught up in the day that we only see the trees and we miss the forest. It’s important to me to define the top three important things we should focus on and I want everybody at my company to know about those things.