Health & Views
SupplementAppears in Sunday Leader of 9th April 2017
Minimise Your Processed Red Meat Eating –WHY?

by Dr. Harold Gunatillake

Red meat has no fibre (soluble or insoluble) a most important ingredient for good functioning of your gut, including the health of trillions of microbiota, living in your gut to look after your health and well-being.

Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) is a molecule produced by the microbes in your large gut when you consume red meat, eggs and dairy.

TMOA molecules produced by our healthy bacteria is harmful to our bodies: produces great blood vessel inflammation leading to atherosclerosis (hardening with plaques) including heart disease.

People who suffer from heart disease have very high levels of TMAO and the latter molecule causes blood clots.

TMAO causes inflammatory diseases in your large bowel-such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, including cancer.

Doctors now check for your TMAO level in your blood when you visit the casualty department (ER) with chest pain, and high levels are diagnostic of a heart attack. This blood test could also give doctors a sense of a patient’s risk for serious heart problems, such as heart attack or even death, a new study finds.

Another urgent blood test the doctors do at the emergency unit is to look at the levels of a compound called ‘Troponin T” which is found in the blood after a person has a heart attack.

So presently in most hospitals both TMAO and Troponin levels are checked up to confirm acute cardiac events.

So the story you take home is not to add on red meat in to your basket, and make it as less frequent as possible, may be when inviting friends to dinner or at a celebration.

There are many expat Sri Lankans suffering from heart disease, and reading this brief article should minimise the future incidence and a recurrence of those who have had the cardiac intervention for an event.

Furthermore, your friendly trillions of microbiota inhabiting your large bowel will be happier if you consume high fibre foods.

They are your best allies and boarders and the tremendous amount of work they do to boost your immune system, digestion of certain foods, manufacture of certain vitamins and so on- needs to be remembered and given credit.