Heart Sisters

Have you seen them?  Vehicles with children trapped in the back seats, and the parents up front smoking?  If it were up to me – and it never is! - those moronic parents would be pulled over, beaten about the head for a while, and charged with child abuse for deliberately forcing their defenseless kidlets to inhale deadly secondhand smoke.  But until I get to make the rules around here, I’m counting on scientists.  I know they are sounding alarms that might change what my daughter Larissa would describe as this ”dumb-ass behaviour”.

The more we learn about the dangers of secondhand smoke (a mix of the smoke that comes from the burning end of a lit cigarette, pipe or cigar plus the smoke blown into the air by the person smoking), the more non-smokers are demanding protection.  Did you know, for example, that if you live with a smoker and are exposed to that secondhand smoke on a regular basis, you have a 30% higher risk of developing both lung cancer and heart disease?  Secondhand smoke has twice as much nicotine and tar as the smoke that smokers inhale, and five times more carbon monoxide, a deadly gas that starves your body of oxygen.  Poisonous secondhand smoke, in fact, can be more dangerous than smoking. Smokers inhale their chemical cocktail through a filter; secondhand smokers aren’t so lucky.

Because of this reality, more and more jurisdictions worldwide are implementing bans on smoking in public places. This ban has resulted in some very good news for our heart health. A new study has found that heart attack rates associated with breathing secondhand smoke dropped rapidly and continued to decrease over time after smoking was banned in public spaces in North American and European communities. (more…)

If this were a course at school, we’d get a failing grade and have to go for remedial after-school help. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. have delivered a report card on our risks of developing heart disease that is so bad, we’d be embarrassed to take it home to show the parents.

Heart health risks were actually looking up for North Americans during the 1970s and 80s. “The limited strides that were made over two decades of improvement, however, have been eroded by increases in excess weight, diabetes and hypertension during more recent decades,” according to study author Dr. Earl Ford.

Dr. Ford and his team tracked data on adults aged 25-74 in four surveys, examining these low-risk criteria for heart disease:  (more…)