Obesity can increase cholesterol and LDL. Diabetes can too. Weight loss and the careful management of diabetes, along with vigorous aerobic exercise can lower cholesterol, can lower LDL, can raise HDL and can reduce the risk of a heart attack.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to include those routines in a frantic life coping with the demands of work, home and family. There always seems to be reason not to go to the gym, always an excuse to eat less healthy foods, always a justification for a little higher blood sugar.

Surgeons have improved gastric surgery during the last 35 years and have added the Lap-Band to their treatments. Most people with very severe obesity do lose weight and lower their cholesterol after the surgery, and the majority of them keep the weight off. However, some learn how to eat multiple small high-calorie meals and gain the weight back. When stomach surgery works, cholesterol falls and for those with diabetes, that disease gets better, too. A change in eating habits is an essential part of this surgery, as is a commitment to follow your doctor’s instructions.

Changing what you eat was the first way to control your cholesterol and it remains a mainstay of treatment. And so, 40 years after the first edition of The Happy Heart Cookbook, it is back with a new revised and updated edition to help you control your cholesterol and your LDL, reduce your risk of an early heart attack, and maybe even help with your weight and diabetes as well. Just remember, improvement requires that you do it for the rest of your life.

 

Heart Attacks: How Early Is Early

Physicians recognized 200 years ago that arteries blocked by hard deposits in their walls could cause death. However, heart attacks were rare before the 1890s when reports of men dying from them began to appear in medical journals. No one understood the causes of the plugged arteries then, and most of those men were sixty years old or more when they died.

Heart attacks became more common in the 1930s and 1940s. Men were victims of those attacks far more often than women.

By the 1950s, doctors understood that hardened, fatty deposits in the arteries of the heart caused blockages that resulted in heart attacks. An early heart attack then was still thought to be one before the age of sixty.

As the twentieth century ended, more heart attacks began to occur in younger men and women in their forties and even thirties. Today, an early heart attack is considered one before fifty and women are as affected as men.

     Doctors now understand the need to look for family histories of early heart attacks, test for abnormal cholesterol and LDL and signs of hardening arteries and begin treatment, all before age forty. However, not every family knows it has a history of early heart attacks and family history is not enough of a guideline for tests. By 2005, the national standard for first tests of cholesterol, regardless of family history, was 21. In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended first tests by age twelve, before puberty.