The Plan will help you reduce your cholesterol. How much you need to bring it down depends on your CHD risk factors. In a nutshell, the greater your risk for a heart attack or stroke—in other words, the more risk factors...
We’ll go into more detail on every aspect of the Plan in the following four chapters. You’ll walk through the Plan week by week starting on click here, But here are the basics in a nutshell. As you might expect, the...
More than anything else, how you live your life determines your likelihood of developing CHD. Even if you have risk factors you can’t do a thing about, making changes to your lifestyle can go a long way toward ensuring you don’t...
When you find out your cholesterol levels have been red-flagged, your reactions may run the gamut from nonchalance to fear to fatalism. For some people, knowing they have a cholesterol problem is what finally makes the obscure risk of heart disease...
Okay, so some things you really ave born with. For instance, researchers have found several genetic abnormalities that can lead to high cholesterol and make lowering your cholesterol through lifestyle changes alone difficult, if not impossible. If this is true for...
Other factors—or, more precisely, markers—may be related to CHD, although there isn’t as much evidence yet to support their role as independent risks as there is for the ones discussed so far. They include: Low magnesium. When researchers at the Centers...
Fibrinogen is a protein that helps your blood clot (picture the fibers in a cloth soaking up liquid). That’s a good thing unless, as too often happens, you wind up with too much of a good thing. Then fibrinogen plays a...
An increasing body of evidence suggests that high levels of iron may explain several heart disease anomalies. For instance, men who regularly donate blood (and thus rid themselves of iron) have a lower risk of heart disease, as do premenopausal women,...
High cholesterol is usually tied to lifestyle, genetic factors, or a combination of the two. But there are other causes. One explanation for high cholesterol that isn’t attributable to lifestyle is hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid gland. Now comes research that...
You’ve probably heard of gout. It’s caused by the buildup of uric acid, a by-product of the breakdown of purines (components in many foods we eat), Over time an elevated uric acid level leads to the formation of needle-like crystals in...
