– posts here focus on latest cardiac news or research about what we put into our mouths
My new favourite food – and it’s not only easy, it’s also heart-healthy. You can whip this up with just one ingredient that you probably have in your kitchen right now. That mystery ingredient, of course, is banana! Frozen bananas turn creamy instead of crumbly in the blender, with a smooth and delectable texture.
Here’s a step-by-step recipe: Continue reading “Heart-healthy homemade ice cream – with just one ingredient!”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Dr. John Henning Schumann, who blogs at the always-intriguing Glass Hospital, is a general internist and medical educator at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine. This year, he made a personal New Year’s resolution to become a vegetarian. Or a ‘mostly vegetarian’, as he calls it.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but with young children who love meat and don’t have the broadest palates, I think it’s important to feed them protein any way I can get it in them. Having passed 40, I’ve finally realized that I can no longer eat what I want with impunity. Further, as a doctor, I believe in practicing what I preach, and my legs could no longer straddle the gap between action and rhetoric.
“That, and I hit 192 pounds on the gym scale. Continue reading “A doctor discovers the heart-smart joys of eating vegan”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Newsweek once called his advice “the state of the art in psycho-cardiology” – a lifestyle regimen best known for the stringency of its ultra-low-fat diet, but with equal emphasis on exercise and stress reduction. And in The Atlantic, the famous preventive medicine guru Dr. Dean Ornish has written an essay called Why Health Care Works Better than Disease Care. Dr. O is founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute.
And his research studies were the first to claim that lifestyle changes can reverse cardiovascular disease without drugs.
He’s a rare duck: a man with the letters M.D. after his name who shuns the prescription pad and Big Pharma’s domination of what’s been called “marketing-based medicine”. Instead, he has long advocated preventing – and even reversing – heart disease without drugs or surgery through changing your lifestyle. He actually recommends two different diets: the prevention diet and the reversal diet. The reversal diet is a very strict low-fat diet designed for people who have diagnosed heart disease.
Alas, so far I have yet to meet any heart patient who has been successful in sticking to this extremely restrictive diet for any significant length of time. Continue reading “Is your doctor telling you to “meditate, eat veggies, walk, quit smoking?” If not, why not?”
Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days! Drop One Dress Size a Day!
Rapid weight loss can be 
so quick and easy – if you believe all those fad diet advertising claims. A fellow heart attack survivor, for example, tells of losing nine pounds in the past five days. She has accomplished this feat, she explains, thanks to a miracle diet she heard about while watching the Dr. Phil show on television.
Phil is always a font of reliable evidence-based health information. (I’m kidding about that last part, my heart sisters).
She was so inspired by this TV interview with a telegenic, fit and very convincing young author of yet another miracle diet book that she went out and bought the expensive best-seller, and says she is now “thrilled” with her resulting nine-pound weight loss results. She does confess, however, that she’s already had to “cheat” on the strict diet a few times in the past five days, and is “struggling” to stay on it so far, but she still seems thrilled nonetheless.
Trouble is, strict weight loss diets typically result in regaining that lost weight – and more. Continue reading “Here’s your basic heart-smart grocery shopping list”
Heart Sisters 
