This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

The microbes in our gut play a big role in helping us digest our food, but as they break down nutrients, they also generate secondary compounds

that can influence our health.

Take carnitine or lethicine, substances found in red meat.

When your gut microbes break them down, the bugs excrete the waste product trimethylamine,

or TMA, which your liver enzymes convert to trimethylamine and oxide, TMAO, and that substance ups the risk of heart disease.

But the effect isn't limited to red meat eaters.

We're constantly feeding our gut microbes these compounds,

and even the most ardent vegetarian or vegan it happens.

Stanley Hazen, a physician in preventive cardiology at Cleveland Clinic.

Every time you eat, even when you eat a pickle or a cucumber or you know pure piece of lettuce

once you eat something your gallbladder contracts and squirt some bile into the

intestines to try to help digest the food.

And even Bile, he says, has compounds like lethison that gut microbes digest into TMA.

So why not block the gut microbes from making TMA in the first place.

Hazen and his colleagues found a substance that does just that.

It's a kind of butenol called DMB, and it's found in extra virgin olive oils,

grape seed oil, and some red wines and balsamic vinegars.

When mice ate dmbb, the compound blocked the gut bacteria from producing TMA, which in turn prevented

clogged arteries in the animals.

I kind of like to think of this as a statin for microbes, you know, when we take a

statin or something that blocks cholesterol synthesis in in our body cells, we're not killing the cell, we're just preventing the cell from making cholesterol.

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