Bad report card: only 7.5% of us have low risk of heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ Leave a comment

 

dunce cap

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:  Continue reading “Bad report card: only 7.5% of us have low risk of heart disease” →

The fall of home cooking and the rise of heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 6 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas 

Chef and food activist Dan Barber, writing in The Nation recently, had a goofy, radical, off-the-wall idea:  we need to learn how to cook.  “A lack of technique behind the stove is as complicit in harming human health and the environment as the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer,” he boldly claimed. And author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), writing in the New York Times, notes the irony of our fascination with wildly popular celebrity chefs and TV cooking shows (even an entire food cable network!):

“How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking. 

Continue reading “The fall of home cooking and the rise of heart disease” →

Love your morning coffee, ladies? The more you drink, the lower your risk of stroke

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

coffee brownHere’s good news for women who drink coffee.  Lots of coffee.  Apparently women who drink four or more cups of coffee per day have a lower risk of stroke than women who don’t drink coffee. Research published in Circulation: The Journal of the American Heart Association looked at data collected in the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest collections of scientific data ever collated.

Begun in 1980, the Nurses’ Health Study tracked over 83,000 women for 24 years. The women, all medical health professionals, started the study with no history of heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer.

After factoring out other habits such as smoking and exercise, the study found that women who drink coffee have a significantly lower risk of stroke, and that the risk decreased further the more coffee the women drank.  Continue reading “Love your morning coffee, ladies? The more you drink, the lower your risk of stroke” →

Ten medication mistakes that can kill

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

pills sinkby Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters  

Anything you put into your mouth has an effect on your body, but ingesting a drug, either prescribed by your doctor or an over-the-counter (OTC) drug like simple headache pills from your local grocery store can be downright dangerous if you are not careful.  Here are 10 common – and potentially fatal – medication errors, courtesy of Caring.com:

1. Confusing two medications with similar names – up to 25% of all reported errors are with meds that sound the same. Examples of commonly confused pairings include Adderall (a stimulant used for ADHD) versus Inderal (a beta-blocker used for high blood pressure).

2.  Taking two or more drugs that magnify each others’ effects – be careful if you’ve been prescribed the blood-thinner Coumadin (warfarin), “the king of drug interactions”. You need just the right amount of Coumadin in your system for it to work properly; too much or too little and you could have serious heart problems such as arrhythmias or a stroke. Because so many other drugs interfere with its action, extreme caution is a must.

3. Overdosing by combining more than one medication with similar properties  – you might have one medication prescribed to treat pain, another for anxiety, and another given as a sleeping pill, but they’re all sedatives, and the combined effect is toxic.  Find out about the other seven mistakes