Matters of the Heart

Last night my niece and I spent about a half hour on the phone talking about healthy food choices for my sister. Let's face it, we all need to follow a healthier diet so this was a good exercise! Today's New York Times would agree:

Most people think heart-healthy living involves sacrifice. Give up your favorite foods. Break a sweat. Lose weight. But some of the best things you can do for your heart do not involve deprivation or medication. Simple and even pleasurable changes in the foods you eat can rival medication in terms of the benefit to your heart.

“Almost everyone has something they can do in their diet or activity that will impact their risk of heart disease,” said Dr. Graham Colditz, adjunct professor of epidemiology at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s not about taking anything to the extremes of major deprivation, extreme marathon running or becoming a vegetarian.”

Even so, many people are not getting the message. While doctors still advise patients to diet, exercise and stop smoking, the medical community has adopted an almost singular focus on cholesterol-lowering drugs as the fastest and best way to battle heart disease. Americans spend $18 billion a year on cholesterol-reducing drugs, making them the nation’s biggest-selling class of drugs. [...]

But an important lesson from the last 50 years is that when it comes to improving heart health, it is important to look beyond the medicine cabinet.

Just a few small changes — eating more fish, vegetables, nuts and fiber — can have a major impact on your risk for heart problems. For some people, drinking moderate amounts of wine may offer additional benefits. Even a 55-year-old man who is about 20 pounds overweight and does not exercise regularly will have a heart-disease risk far below average if he regularly consumes fish, nuts, fiber and vegetables and drinks moderate amounts of wine.

It’s hard to believe that such simple food changes can make a meaningful difference, but data from hundreds of studies show they can.

So what is your risk? Below are a few ways you can assess your risk.

Take this test to assess "Your Disease Risk"

My risk is above average: "Above average risk doesn't mean you'll definitely get heart disease. It's just an estimate based on your risk factors, some of which you may not be able to change."

Check out how your heart works here.

The American Heart Association offers a Learn and Live quiz. Take it now.

Check out the Beats and Breaths calculator here.

The beats and breaths calculator will amaze you … and may even leave you breathless. In a typical minute your heart beats about 72 times and you take in about 15 breaths. In terms of numbers for beats and breaths, that's more than 4,000 heartbeats and 900 breaths in an hour. And in your lifetime? Let us do the math with our beats and breaths calculator! By entering the month, day and year of your birth we'll estimate your beats and breaths so far.

Number of heart beats since my birth: 2,110,081,104
Number of breaths since my birth: 439, 600,230

Wow!

And finally, the Tailgater's Handbook for a healthy heart! Hummm ... now if I could only get my friend DCup and her family to move to DC, she could prepare some of these delicious items for me!

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This and That

If only it weren't so expensive I would certainly think about having Braco cloned. She was the best dog I've ever owned. How wonderful would it be to be able to have her around forever! Check out Beloved Pets Everlasting? in today's New York Times.

A report on the connection between blood sugar control and memory decline is the most popular article in the newspaper's heath section.

Spikes in blood sugar can take a toll on memory by affecting the dentate gyrus, an area of the brain within the hippocampus that helps form memories, a new study reports.

Researchers said the effects can be seen even when levels of blood sugar, or glucose, are only moderately elevated, a finding that may help explain normal age-related cognitive decline, since glucose regulation worsens with age.

The study, by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, was published in the December issue of Annals of Neurology.

“If we conclude this is underlying normal age-related cognitive decline, then it affects all of us,” said lead investigator Dr. Scott Small, associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. The ability to regulate glucose starts deteriorating by the third or fourth decade of life, he added.

Since glucose regulation is improved with physical activity, Dr. Small said, “We have a behavioral recommendation — physical exercise.”

So maybe it's time to get up from your computer and move around!

And speaking of getting up from your chair, it's now official -- even having unlimited resources can't prevent some of us from holding on to those extra pounds. In New Year, New You? Nice Try Oprah Winfrey laments that:

“I didn’t just fall off the wagon,” she wrote in the January issue [of O magazine]. “I let the wagon fall on me.”

Here is a news flash for Jay Leno, and everyone else who loves to make fun of people who are overweight, obesity is an accident of birth. Children born to fat parents are genetically predisposed to be fat. In order to be normal weight an obese person must take extraordinary measures every single day to fool their body -- and that shit gets tiring sometimes. Even for Oprah.

It was explained to me that there are numerous mechanisms in the human body that control whether a person is normal weight, overweight or underweight. One of the reasons it's been such a challenge for researchers to develop one magic cure for obesity is that any given person it's a different configuration of these mechanisms that are working incorrectly. For an obese person, their body's set point might be 250 pounds, when they should probably actually weigh no more than 150 to be considered "normal" weight. Every day their body will fight to maintain that 250 pound weight. In order to alter that weight, the person must "fool" their body by consuming fewer calories than needed to maintain the weight, and engage in physical activity to help manage their metabolism.

“Most of us think that we can change our lives if we just summon the willpower and try even harder this time around,” said Alan Deutschman, the former executive director of Unboundary, a firm that counsels corporations on how to navigate change, and the author of “Change or Die,” a book that asserts that even though most people have the ability to change, they rarely do. “It’s exceptionally hard to make life changes,” Mr. Deutschman said, “and our efforts are usually doomed to failure when we try to do it on our own.”

In a season of change, in a year of change, most people who embark on a journey of self-renewal can expect anything but. Research shows that about 80 percent of people who make resolutions on Jan. 1 fall off the wagon by Valentine’s Day, according to Marti Hope Gonzales, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota.

The inability to "change" may seem "un-American" to people who live in "a country born of change (revolution), and our most cherished historical archetypes (the Pilgrims, the pioneers, the rags-to-riches entrepreneurs) are parables of reinvention".

But the numbers tell a different story.

Dr. Edward D. Miller, the dean of the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said more than 70 percent of coronary bypass patients revert to unhealthy habits within two years of their operation. Dr. Dean Ornish, the cardiologist and diet author, frequently cites a conclusion by a panel of nutritional experts convened in 1992 by the National Institutes of Health that two-thirds of dieters gain back any lost weight within a year.

The difficulty of changing may have evolutionary origins, said Marion Kramer Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in Laguna Beach, Calif., and author of “Take-Charge Living: How to Recast Your Role in Life ... One Scene at a Time.”

If one believes that human beings are social animals, our hierarchies within families, governments and businesses depend on people who know their roles and perform them dutifully.

“We’re hard-wired not to change quickly,” Dr. Jacobs said. “Think of what chaos would ensue if you could snap your finger and change instantly tomorrow. You would be one person today, someone else tomorrow.”

Okay, but can't I just snap my fingers and be normal weight for the next 50 years or so? Oh, and can my friend Oprah have the same wish?

New Year Blog Surfing

Yesterday I spent 10 hours on the road driving back from Indiana, so the dogs and I have spent a pretty quiet day sleeping in our favorite chair! I'm too tired to come up with anything on my own, so here is a collection of posts from around the tubes.


The video is lovingly stolen from FranIAm

The BushCo Legacy
by Joe at Hard-Boiled Dreams of the World

The Great Buggy Bailout of 1905
by Joe at Hard-Boiled Dreams of the World

What's The News Across the Nation..
by Distributorcap NY

And what better way to begin a New Year than with a cute baby video!


The Evil Eye video from Jesus' General