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red meat

Energy Drinks, Red Meat, the Gut and the Heart: My Take

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By now, you’ve probably heard the news about two recent research studies strongly linking a compound called TMAO to heart disease and stroke. After all, Dr. Oz covered it, so it’s got to be big news.

Here’s the basics:

  • Two dietary compounds L-carnitine and phosphatidylcholine (we’ll cover diet sources later) get converted by bacteria in the gut to TMA.
  • TMA heads to the liver where it is further converted by an enzyme called FMO3 to TMAO.
  • TMAO has been strongly linked to heart disease and stroke irrespective of other, more widely known, risk factors.

L-carnitine comes from a few notorious sources.  Red meat.  Energy drinks boasting high levels of L-carnitine.  Bodybuilding supplements.

Phoshotidylcholine is founds in eggs and beef liver (just in case you eat this on a regular basis…).

While some articles are blowing off the results of this study, I think that we need to look at this data as real, and try to figure out why and how it may occur.  Overall, the results in these two particular studies (New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine) should raise some eyebrows.  Here’s what they found:

  1. Those with the highest levels of TMAO had a 254% overall increased risk of having a heart attack, stroke or dying.
  2. The risk of dying in the highest TMAO group was an impressive 337% higher.
  3. This risk was present even after accounting for traditional risk factors as well as in those patients who were considered low-risk.

Now here’s where the story gets a little more interesting…

  • In one of the studies, participants were given antibiotics.  The antibiotics almost completely shut down the production of TMAO.
  • Once the antibiotics were stopped, the TMAO levels increased again.
  • In vegetarians and vegans, the levels of TMAO remained low despite increased intake of phosphatidylcholine or L-carnitine.

Clearly, the bacterial flora in the gut had an incredibly strong role in whether or not these dietary components caused problems or not.

Gee…have we heard this somewhere before?

Have you maybe heard someone say that destruction of the normal flora in the human body is a potentially devastating event, especially in a child?  Like…maybe me??

There is a well accepted concept that the bacterial flora in the gut adapts to a particular lifestyle.  Women in Asian countries with higher intakes of soy have higher equol-producing bacteria in their gut and thus, derive greater benefits from eating soy than do their American-born, non-soy-eating counterparts.  Could this be yet another example of how the bacterial flora in vegetarians adapt to that lifestyle, lowering the risk of disease?

Further, could our country’s love of antibiotics for minor sniffles be destroying the delicate balance of the bacteria in our gut, leading to chronic disease?  Multiple lines of research suggest this is a solid answer.

So what is the bottom line?  Of course, avoiding energy drinks and limiting red meat intake was already on your list.  While these studies did not identify specific bacteria that were responsible for the conversion, they generally fall under the category of methylotrophic bacteria.  These are NOT generally the types of bacteria found in probiotic supplements.  It would seem likely that the use of probiotics would lead to less of the bacteria that leads to the conversion of these dietary compounds to TMA.

RED MEAT AND COLON CANCER; THE HIDDEN FACTOR

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There has always been some degree of disagreement when it comes to the connection between red meat and colon cancer. Like most things when it comes to good health, the answer and the connections are not that simple.

I remember having a “discussion” a decade or so ago with a representative from the AZ Beef Council who absolutely refused to acknowledge that red meat was a player in colon cancer and heart disease. Not that she had a biased position (I could imagine that her tenure as an employee would probably be pretty short without this biased opinion).

Now, more than a decade later, it is clear that an animal based diet high in animal based proteins (the magic number seems to be around 20%–so keep animal proteins, including dairy, under 20% of your protein intake). But the story is not that straightforward.

Clearly, the quality of the meat plays a role.  Organic, grass fed beef that is grass fed throughout the entire lifecycle will have a better effect on our health. Wild game falls into the same category. And for the record, pork is NOT the “other white meat.” Really…when was the last time you looked at bacon and thought “white meat”…?

Adding spices to red meat can increase the value of the meat and lower the potential for damage to our health.

This particular article adds more information to the overall picture of how red meat consumption does or does not contribute to colon cancer risk. 

Regular readers will already know what a telomere is. As a refresher, consider them as the wick on the end of the DNA of our cells. When this wick burns down, that’s it. The cell is no more. So, the longer the telomere on the end of our DNA, the longer that cell is going to live and, by extension, the longer you are going to live.  (Click here to read more on telomeres)

The authors looked at what happened to the length of the telomeres of the colon cells when resistant starch was added to a diet of red meat and found that resistant starch actually protected the telomeres from being shortened in the presence of red meat in the diet.

This says two things. First, red meat clearly plays some role in the development of colon cancer. Two, the addition of resistant starch (think of foods like beans, whole grains and basmati rice) protected the telomeres in the colon cells.