Interesting information on statins

I have hated to see Cliff taking Lipitor, since his CABG; after all, it's been known to do damage to the liver.  That's why people taking that particular prescription, or other statins, have blood tests every three months:  to make sure the liver is doing OK. 

But today I was reading a medical blog I follow, "The Examining Room of Dr. Charles", and was directed to a National Geographic article, Mending Broken Hearts.

Here's the part that grabbed my attention: 

Eric Topol, a cardiologist.... is as lean as a greyhound and weathered in a cowboyish way. He talks slowly and eats minimally: salads for dinner and high-fiber cereal for breakfast. He doesn't eat lunch at all. Like almost every cardiologist I've talked to, he takes statins preventively, and his cholesterol count is a low 135. His children, 22 and 25, also eat uncommonly well for their ages.

I think I'll stop being so concerned about Cliff's Lipitor.

McDonald's, it's about time!

McDonalds finally got on the bandwagon and is replacing their unhealthy oils with trans-fat-free cooking oil. 

" A Harvard study also found that eating just 5 grams of trans fat a day could increase the risk of heart disease by 25 percent. Researchers concluded that eliminating trans fat from the American diet could prevent between 6 and 19 percent of heart attacks and related deaths each year."

"The new McDonald's oil will consist of a mixture of canola, corn and soy. The new oil has already rolled out in 1,200 of the chain's 13,700 U.S. restaurants, he said. More will receive the new supplies as they become available."

The entire article is HERE.

Tags: trans fats, McDonalds

Eat food

I was directed, by way of a medical blog I was reading, to a quite long article online explaining what's wrong with American thinking as regards to what we eat.  It was a lot more reading than I wanted to do, so I did some skimming.  But on the next-to-last page, I found these nuggets of wisdom:

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

I was very disappointed to learn that the American Heart Association charges for their endorsement.  So much for their advice, eh?

Again, the article is HERE.

Tags: American heart association, healthy diet