http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-new...burgers-7395313

Whenever vegans bring up TMAO, I point them to this article by Mark McCarthy, a committed vegan who debunks that nonsense.

And people who are fearful of red meat eat a lot of... chicken.

Which is high in Omega 6s and has the highest contamination rate of any meat.

I'll stick with my grass fed hamburger, thanks

A similar study done at Harvard in 2013 was discussed (and debunked ) here .. New Heart Disease Culprit: Red Meat and TMAO

Of course, there is no mention of the bun, or the ketchup on the burger.

Because we do NOT eat foods in isolation, in general. We eat every high fat meat, if we eat a SAD, along with high carb foods.

When they do a study on people eating LCHF for 20 or 30 years, and find THEY are at higher risk for cancers, then I may pay attention. But this? Nonsense.

The suggested mechanism depends on the gut bacteria. Vegetarians seem to end up with less TMAO in exchange for carnitine, when they eat it. Of course, the study that showed this had people eat a steak plus a carnitine pill, and see what happened to their TMAO levels. They could as easily have been fed turnips with the carnitine.


Maybe because vegetarians have better gut bacteria than people eating the SAD diet--or maybe because carnitine uptake from the gut is upregulated, that tends to happen when your diet is deficient in something. In mice at least, blocking gut bacteria with an antibiotic blocks the effect.

This jumps out at me from the Mark McCarthy article RawNut posted;



Especially the blue. And while I'm not so in love with a plant-based diet, for a lot of people who have bought into the status quo on diet, red meat and eggs are the sorts of foods they eat when they're not really trying to be all that healthy.

My question is why are they always using TMAO to dis red meat when fish and other seafood contain so much more of it, PREFORMED at that?

It would stand to reason that fish eaters would have higher TMAO levels yet fish is inversely associated with heart disease. WTF?

Maybe because the Walt Willetts of the world are too powerful and well respected. There's good grant money to be had, as long as the business you're at is giving even remotely plausible mechanisms to back up spurious correlations.

I'm sure if they look hard enough, next they can find some substance in fish that, at ridiculous doses, protects mice from the increase in atherosclerosis that can be caused by ridiculous doses of TMAO.

Every plant and every animal is a virtual pharmacopeia, there's no end to the substances with drug-like effects to be found. In plants they look for things that might protect from disease, so they find them--even though the amount of something like resveratrol you'd need to get from a food is unrealistic, that didn't keep people from claiming for a while that it might be behind the French paradox. With animal foods, the assumption going in is that it's deadly--and you'll always find something that's deadly, at some dose.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25686243



Looks like omega 3's have already been proposed as a protective factor vs. TMAO.