 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 bilarity, 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 bilarity, 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 actually 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 risk. Right now, it can improve some of the markers associated with elevated cardiovascular risk, and I think that's a very encouraging finding, especially when we consider that probiotics are very benign substances and we're 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 bacterial exposure both environmentally and from a lack of eating things like fermented foods. Also, the positive impact we see from probiotic supplementations on gastrointestinal health further increases the favorability of using a probiotic as a general preventative health measure. So again, this study showed that saccharomyces polarity, a healthy probiotic fungus, decreased remnant lipoprotein, which is in the family of cholesterol and a predictive marker for heart disease, decreased 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 self-mending with probiotics seems to be a reasonable approach or a reasonable recommendation. This is Dr. Rousseau. I hope this information helps you get healthy and you get back to your life. Thanks.