Fungal Probiotics May Decrease Heart Disease Risk

Your gut can affect many of the systems of your body, including your cardiovascular system. Probiotics can help improve the health of your gut and a recent study has shown may help to decrease cardiovascular disease risk.

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We recommend the following S. Bouldrii probiotic.

Dr. Michael Ruscio: Can supplementing with probiotics help protect you from cardiovascular disease?

Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio. And a recent study suggests the answer to this question is “Yes.” I’ll put the study abstract here up in the screen. And essentially, what this study did was for eight weeks daily supplementation with Saccharomyces boulardii, a probiotic, was shown to lower remnant lipoprotein by 15%. Remnant lipoprotein is a predictive biomarker and potential target in the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, according to this study.

So again, this study gave a group of patients Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a healthy probiotic fungus. And over the course of eight weeks, they saw a 15% reduction in this cholesterol. Remnant lipoprotein is a precursor to LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol. And so it’s in the family of cholesterol. And it’s a predictive marker for heart disease risk. So these findings are very interesting.

And when we look at other findings, looking at other probiotics and other similar studies, we see numerous studies show that probiotics can have a favorable impact on cholesterol levels.

We’ve also recently discussed how some probiotics can actual lower homocysteine. And this may happen via the probiotics enhancing bacteria levels in the gut. Those bacteria producing B vitamins naturally. These B vitamins then lower homocysteine, which is another risk factor for heart disease. So overall, probiotics show a lot of promise for being able to prevent and hopefully decrease cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular occurrences.

We don’t really have great data that proves that yet. We don’t really have great data showing that if we take two groups of people, one group take a probiotic for the next five years, the other group do not, the group taking the probiotic has a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease or episodes. To my knowledge, we don’t have that data yet. But we have this preliminary data that is showing that probiotics favorably impact some of the markers in the body that denote future risk for a cardiovascular episode. So very promising.

I’m hoping as future research is done, we’ll see more of the clinical science substantiating the fact that probiotics can, in fact, help lower risks. Right now, it can improve some of the markers associated with elevated cardiovascular risks. And I think that’s a very encouraging finding, especially when we consider that probiotics are very benign substances and were fairly deficient in exposure to healthy bacteria in many Westernized areas. So certainly, it’s very plausible that probiotics make sense to help get back some of this missing bacteria exposure, both environmentally and from a lack of eating things like fermented foods.

Also, the positive impact we see from probiotic supplementation on gastrointestinal health further increases a favorability of using a probiotic as a general preventative health measure.

So again, this study shows that Saccharomyces boulardii, a healthy probiotic fungus, decrease remnant lipoprotein—which is in the family of cholesterol and a predictive marker for heart disease—decrease that marker by 15%.

So if you’re someone who has a family history of heart disease or you’re simply trying to prevent heart disease, then supplementing with probiotics seems to be a reasonable approach or a reasonable recommendation.

This is Dr. Ruscio. I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life.

Thanks.

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What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts or experience with this.