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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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How Is Egg Linked To Heart Disease? Many victims died of heart disease and stroke but had no noticeable risk factors such as high cholesterol, unhealthy triglycerides, diabetes, high blood pressure or obesity. So what are the culprits behind these tragedies? Some surprising suspects, trillions of bacteria and other microbes living in the human gut, were identified to be responsible for the mishaps in a paper published on April 25, 2013 in ‘The New England Journal of Medicine’. Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute discovered that some of those bugs turn lecithin, which is a nutrient in egg yolks, liver, beef, pork and wheat germ, into an artery-clogging compound called TMAO. The blood levels of TMAO were also found to predict heart attack, stroke or death, independent of other risk factors. The study was based on the previous discovery in 2011 by the Cleveland Clinic team that, in laboratory mice, gut bacteria turn the nutrient phosphatidylcholine (commonly known as lecithin) in food into TMAO (trimethylamine-N-oxide) causing heart disease. Its aim was to find out whether human gut bacteria trigger the lecithin-to-TMAO alchemy, like those in mice, and whether high levels of TMAO can predict heart attacks and stroke in people many years out, not simply mark the presence of cardiovascular disease at the time of the blood test.
40 healthy adults, who participated in the study, were asked to eat 2 hard-boiled eggs containing lots of lecithin. TMAO levels in the blood were found to rise, just as in laboratory mice. However, after a week of broad-spectrum antibiotics, the participants’ TMAO levels barely changed after eating eggs. This indicated that the intestinal bacteria (which antibiotics kill) are essential for forming TMAO. To find out whether TMAO is linked to cardiovascular events, the researchers measured TMAO levels in 4,007 heart disease patients. After taking into account of other risk factors like age and previous heart attack, they found that high levels of TMAO were predictive of heart attack, stroke and death over the 3 years that patients were followed. Actually, TMAO could predict cardiovascular risk more accurately than triglyceride or cholesterol levels, even in people without substantial coronary artery disease or dangerous lipid levels as well as in sicker patients. The study actually found that patients in the top 25 percent of TMAO levels had 2.5 times the risk of a cardiovascular event compared to those in the lower 25 percent. But why is TMAO so potent? According to researchers, TMAO makes blood cholesterol build up on artery walls causing atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and hence raises the risk of stroke or heart attack. Further research is, however, necessary to find out whether TMAO can reliably predict cardiovascular events better than other blood tests can so that TMAO could possibly serve as an accurate screening tool for future heart risk. Earlier, Cleveland Clinic researchers also reported that gut bugs could transform carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat and dairy products, into TMAO. Vegetarians made much less TMAO even when eating carnitine as part of the study. All these findings suggested people with high levels of TMAO could lower their cardiovascular risk by eating fewer egg yolks and less beef and pork. Nevertheless, it is not the goal for the researchers to impose dietary restrictions of entire food groups. After all, eggs, meat and other animal products are an integral part of most individuals’ diets. Unhealthy TMAO might be controlled by prebiotics (compounds that nurture healthy gut microbes) or probiotics (the good bugs themselves). But right now, there is no idea which prebiotics or probiotics might do that. For instance, probiotics actually raised TMAO-producing bacteria in one study, and just popping antibiotics might not work either, as bacteria will become resistant to the drugs. Several other studies had linked human microbiota, which is microbes in the gut, nose and genital tract and on the skin, to health and disease. For example, certain species of gut bacteria were found to protect against asthma while others affect the risk of obesity.
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