Category: What You and Your Doctor Can Do

As we noted above, if you have diabetes, it’s likely you have or will have CHD unless you dramatically change your lifestyle. However, one-third of all people with diabetes don’t even know they have it. If you scored 10 or more points: You are at high risk for having diabetes. Only your health care provider can check to see if you have diabetes. See your doctor for tests. If you scored 9 points or fewer: You are probably at low risk for having diabetes now. Keep your risk low by losing weight if you are overweight, being active most days, and eating low-fat meals that are high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grain foods...

Sometimes no amount of dietary and lifestyle change is enough to get your cholesterol down to a safe level. While some people can makejust a few changes—substituting butter for olive oil, or eating fish instead of steak twice a week—and see their cholesterol drop 15 points in two weeks, others may follow the Plan to the nth degree and still find their numbers have barely budged. These people are called “non responders.” About 20 percent of adults fall into this category, usually due to their genetic makeup. On the other hand, those people who saw their levels plummet quickly are “hyper-responders,” and, again, about 20 percent of adults fall in this category. If you’re a nonresponder, it’s likely you will need medication as well as lifestyle changes to bring your cholesterol down. Generally, if you’ve followed the  Plan closely for three months (no cheating!) and your levels haven’t budged or have only dropped a little, talk to your doctor about medication that...

Take this quiz to determine your risk for CHD or heart attack. The answers will help you set LDL goals and let you know if you may need to start on a cholesterol-lowering drug. Step 1 Count Your Risk Factors If you don’t have known heart disease or diabetes, answer the following questions. lf you do, go directly to step 2 on the next page. (Not sure whether or not you have heart disease? If you’ve had a heart attack, a bypass operation, angioplasty, or an angiogram that showed a blockage in a coronary artery, or if you suffer from angina, you probably do.) Check all that apply: I smoke cigarettes. I have high blood pressure (140/90 mm/Hg or higher, or you’re on blood pressure medication). I have low HDL cholesterol (less than 40 mg/dl). I have a family history of early heart disease (heart disease in your father or brother before age 55, or in your mother or sister before age 65). I’maman 45 or older, or a woman 55 or older, if you checked one risk factor or...

Even if you already have heart disease, it’s not too late to help your heart . if you have CHD your risk of heart aattack or some other coronary event is much higher than that of someone who doesn’t so your need for  Plan is that much urgent, and its potential energy it that much greater. >...

Controlling your cholesterol can do much more than simply protect you from heart disease and stroke, A growing body of evidence suggests that what’s good for the heart may also be good for the mind, and that low levels of cholestero! may help prevent Alzheimer’s disease. In one of the strongest studies linking the two, Finnish researchers tracked nearly 1,500 people for an average of 21 years. They found that high cholesterol and blood pressure appeared to increase Alzheimer’s risk even more than the so-called Alzheimer’s gene (apo E-4), often cited as the most important genetic risk factor for the disease. And when researchers at Case Western Reserve University compare the diets of 96 Alzheimer’s patients to those of healthy patients, they found that those who tended to eat a diet low in fat and high in fish, vegetables, whole grains, and antioxidants like And when researchers at Case Western Reserve University compared the diets of 96 Alzheimer’s...

Knowing your weight isn’t enough to determine if you’re overweight or obese. For that you need to know your Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure that takes into account both height and weight.” >...

A trim waistline cuts ae dashing figure—it may cut your risk of heart disease, too, since weight carried around the midsection increases the risk. Use a tape measure to measure the smallest part of your natural waist, usually the belly button. A circumference of more than 40 inches in men or 35 inches in women indicate an increase risk of  CHD...

If you think cigar smoking is a safe alternative to cigarette smoking because you don’t inhale the smoke from a cigar, think again. A large study published in 1999 in the New England Journal of Medicine found cigar smokers were more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than nonsmokers, and twice as likely as nonsmokers to suffer from cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, or lungs. Cigar smoking causes almost twice as many heart attacks and strokes as it does lung cancer, because nicotine causes arteries to narrow and increases heart rate, whether it’s inhaled or absorbed through the mouth; cigars have 10 to 400 times more nicotine than the average cigarette. Too bad Ulysses S. Grant, Sigmund Freud, and Babe Ruth didn’t know this: All three died from cigar-related diseases. >...

We know that estrogen plays a role in helping women maintain healthy levels of cholesterol before menopause. After menopause, as estrogen levels plummet, LDL tends to rise, HDL drops, and triglycerides increase. In theory, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) should solve those problems. And when researchers looked back on large populations of women who chose to take HRT, the numbers seemed to support this theory, But the story isn’t so simple after all. In 2002 the government halted part of a major trial, the Women’s Health Initiative, after realizing that Primero, a brand of pill that combines estrogen and another hormone, progestin, not soy offers valuable nutrients without only failed to protect women from the saturated fat of meat, and thus is heart disease, it actually increased a good addition to a heart-healthy diet. the incidence slightly. The drug also slightly raised the incidence of breast cancer, stroke, and blood clots in postmenopausal women. Researchers don’t...