When Dr. Jerome Haym, a 77-year-old retired physician from Delray Beach, FL, underwent his second angioplasty and stent, he wasn’t feeling like his usual self. “I was having trouble controlling my weight,” he recalls, “and didn’t exercise as much as I should. I felt tired and didn’t have as much energy.” Motivated to make a…
The plaques within arteries that trigger the vast majority of heart attacks do not significantly impede blood flow. In fact, an angiogram report would likely describe them as plaque build-up that is “insignificant” or “nonobstructive,” or “minimal atherosclerosis.”
It’s shocking how much salt (sodium-chloride) is packed into soups. At Panera, a cup of Garden Vegetable Soup has 750 milligrams of sodium. That’s half what the American Heart Association says we should have for the entire day. A can of Campbell’s “Healthy Request” Chicken Noodle Soup has 820 milligrams of sodium. Healthy? Not even close. And these salt licks are not outliers. They’re typical in America.
The neighbor’s dog is barking at 3 am. The checkout line at the grocery store is 12 people deep. Your car’s battery just died. Your mother called with troubling news about her health. How do you react to each of the above? Are you calm or crazy? When life’s hurdles get the best of us, it can contribute to everything from irritable bowel syndrome to heart disease.
LDL cholesterol is not the only bad thing embedding itself in our artery walls. To get a sense of all our plaque producers, non-HDL cholesterol is the number to look at.
“Leg pain and poor circulation, called claudication, is the result of the tissue not receiving enough oxygen-rich blood. It is the muscle crying from oxygen starvation,” states Dr. Danine Fruge, MD, ABFP, Medical Director at the Pritikin Longevity Center.
A growing body of research is finding that apoB may be a better predictor of heart disease risk than long-standing federal guidelines for “good” HDL and “bad” LDL cholesterol. What is apoB? (Its official name is apolipoprotein B.) Find out in this article.
New research is affirming that a good night’s sleep, about seven to eight hours for the vast majority of people, is vital for our hearts and overall health.
A cheeseburger. Fries. Coke. Cookies. Or maybe a Philly sub did you in. Find out how one bad meal affects your body. Research is finding that some results are immediate, and they’re not pretty.
And certainly, lifestyle treatment for atrial fibrillation is a safer approach – risk-free, in fact – compared to procedures like ablation. As Dr. John Mandrola candidly writes. “It is one thing to prescribe a pill; it is yet another to deliver 60 to 80 burns to the left atrium,” which is essentially what catheter ablation does.
