Functional Medicine puts a major focus on the gut. The health of the digestive system greatly impacts the health of the whole body, in large part due to the hundreds of trillions of bacteria residing there, breaking down our food, fighting pathogens, controlling our metabolism, and more.

This week’s guest on The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dr. Stanley Hazen, is here to share more about how the microbiome can influence disease risk and why this is an essential piece to the future of medicine.

Dr. Hazen made a seminal discovery of a bacterial metabolite, called TMAO, that may be linked to heart disease risk. Everyone has baseline levels of TMAO, as it’s naturally produced in the body to a certain extent. Throughout our talk, we dig into how diet can influence TMAO but also how genetics can increase levels, the same way some people have a genetic predisposition towards high blood sugar and risk of diabetes, and what that can mean. TMAO is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is a helpful clue in understanding how microbes can impact our health in multiple ways.

And for anyone who is curious about what kind of diet a preventative cardiologist recommends, Dr. Hazen provides his research-based tips for the healthiest way to eat and why diet should be thought of as a permanent lifestyle choice, not a temporary fix. It’s the biggest part of our health we can control, and if we don’t fix that we are in big trouble. Curing heart disease won’t be done with a silver bullet, but Dr. Hazen has plenty of insights on a comprehensive approach to reduce your risk starting today.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, I hope you’ll tune in.