A balanced gut microbiome can reduce inflammation and lower heart disease risk.
Welcome to the Younger Longer 28-Day Healthy Heart Challenge, a transformative podcast series designed to help you take control of your heart health and live a longer, healthier life. Over the next 28 days, we’ll guide you through a comprehensive journey covering key aspects of cardiovascular wellness—nutrition, exercise, stress management, medical awareness, and lifestyle choices.
Each daily episode is packed with expert insights from Dr. Warrick Bishop, best-selling author and cardiologist dedicated to preventing heart disease before it becomes a life-threatening issue. Using the latest science and practical strategies, this series empowers you to make heart-healthy choices and build habits that will support your well-being for years to come.
What You’ll Learn in the 28 Days:
✔ Understanding Your Heart – How it functions and why proactive care is essential.
✔ Heart-Healthy Nutrition – The best foods to fuel your cardiovascular system.
✔ Exercise & Movement – The role of physical activity in strengthening your heart.
✔ Stress & Mental Well-being – Managing stress and anxiety for a healthier heart.
✔ The Power of Sleep – How sleep quality impacts cardiovascular function.
✔ The Impact of Smoking & Alcohol – Making informed lifestyle changes.
✔ Supplements & Medical Insights – Understanding key nutrients and medical checkups.
✔ Advanced Heart Testing & Risk Factors – Going beyond traditional risk assessments.
✔ Sustaining Long-Term Heart Health Habits – Turning knowledge into action for lifelong benefits.
Why Listen?
- Get practical tips and science-backed advice you can apply immediately.
- Learn from real-world examples and medical expertise.
- Gain daily challenges to help you stay engaged and track progress.
- Take charge of your heart health in a simple, effective, and engaging way.
Your heart is your most vital organ, and the steps you take today will shape your future health. Whether you’re looking to prevent heart disease, manage risk factors, or simply improve your overall well-being, this 28-day challenge is your roadmap to a healthier, longer life.
Subscribe and start your journey today—because every heartbeat counts!
Transcript
G'day and welcome to day 16, and today we're talking gut health and, importantly, the gut microbiome. Well, wow, this is interesting. And I'm obviously a cardiologist—don't know much about the gut—but I wandered into a gut microbiome presentation a number of years ago in the States at the American College of Cardiology meeting, and it was just fascinating talking about the impact of altering the gut microbiome on cardiovascular function.
Well, my brief for these short podcasts is about three to five minutes, so I'm not going to be able to cover everything I'd like to, but I have done a more extensive podcast on salt and gut microbiome health, and I strongly recommend you have a listen to that if you're at all interested. It's absolutely fascinating. But what we don't realize is that the gut really is critical to our total body well-being. And if we really, really think about it, it's really an externalized surface of our bodies internalized, because if you swallow a string from your mouth, you could follow that string all the way through to the other end. So your gut is actually exposed to what we would quite reasonably say is the outside world. The intestine is keeping our bodies from the world. And it turns out that the microbiome are protecting us from that outside world.
And that gut microbiome is complicated. Many of the bugs have features which allow them to survive in oxygen—we call those aerobic. But many cannot survive in oxygen because, deep in the gut, oxygen doesn't get in there. And we call those anaerobic. It makes it extremely difficult to measure exactly or grow exactly what bugs are in the microbiome.
But how do we do that then? Well, there are clever tests that allow us to collect a stool sample, a poo sample, send that poo sample off for evaluation where they look at the DNA particles within that stool poo sample to try and figure out exactly what gut microbiome balance, what bugs are specifically present.
Well, why do we worry about it? For a whole lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is that if you feed the right bacteria fibre, you'll get those bacteria in your gut making short-chain fatty acids, things like butyrate, which are considered to be protective for the development of large bowel cancer. We also know that feeding the right microbiome looks after that microbiome. And that microbiome then protects the endothelial lining of the gut, stopping it from becoming stressed and leaky. And if we don't have a leaky gut, that improves our immune system.
We also know that an imbalanced gut microbiome, sometimes linked to low fibre and high processed foods, can increase the production of trimethylamine N-oxide. Well, that's a mouthful. And that mouthful is abbreviated to TMAO, T-M-A-O, which has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. So a by-product of the wrong sort of food for our gut microbiome.
Feeding your gut things like vegetables for fibre is really, really valuable. And when you do eat, instead of thinking about what you're feeding yourself for your own well-being, see if you can start to reframe it as what you're eating in terms of the well-being of your gut microbiome. Because I can assure you, if you look after your gut microbiome, it will look after you.
If you do want to know a bit more, check out the podcast on salt and gut microbiome. It's absolutely fascinating. For now, I am going to leave you. I do hope you live as well as possible. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Take care and bye for now.
Are You at Risk of a Sudden Heart Attack? How Healthy is Your Heart? Really?
Heart disease is the #1 killer in the Western World. In Australia, someone dies every 28 minutes from heart disease. That’s 51 people a day. In the US, someone has a heart attack every 40 SECONDS! Fortunately, many heart attacks are preventable. However, regular exercise and eating healthy are no guarantee you won’t succumb to this silent killer.
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