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Tag : cholesterol
Link Between Soft Drink & Incidence of Depression
A new study links soft drinks and depression. Researchers followed almost 264,000 people for 10 years. The study demonstrated rather convincingly that people who drink more than four soft drinks per day have a 30% increase in their risk of becoming clinically depressed.
Interestingly, it’s not the sugar, since those who drank diet soda had a slightly higher risk of depression than those who drank the sugared versions. The sugar, of course, will make you fat, raise your cholesterol, and increase your risk of dementia. But there’s something else that’s present in both the diet and sugared versions that seems to increase your risk of developing a
The Simple Truth About Cardiac Risk
Thanks to modern medical advances, there are an almost unlimited number of tests doctors can administer to determine who is at the greatest risk of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Take the simple cholesterol test, for example: today we doctors can subdivide your cholesterol into seven or eight or even nine smaller subtypes and analyze your risk of cardiovascular disease, even if you appear to have “low” or “normal” cholesterol. Physicians today can administer a battery of expensive tests for just about everything.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 3
Is their higher level of testosterone the reason men have an increased risk of heart disease compared to women? For many years doctors have thought so. This belief seems to have grown largely out of the fact that women generally tend to have lower risk of cardiovascular disease than men (at least until after menopause). Because estrogen has a significant anti-inflammatory effect in the blood vessels, and because we think of testosterone as the opposite of estrogen, for a long time the medical community presumed that testosterone must increase the inflammation that can lead to heart disease.
We now know that, like estrogen, testosterone also has a potent anti-inflammatory effect in the arteries. Testosterone isn’t part of the problem – but it can be part of the solution.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 2
In our last blog we talked about Cholesterol and Heart Disease. We discussed how the dangerous build-up of plaque is a result of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL cholesterol, becoming damaged or oxidized in the bloodstream. The body treats this oxidized LDL as a threat, and sends white blood cells to attack the cholesterol. In order to reduce the threat of heart disease, we have to prevent plaque from forming. There are three major ways to accomplish this.
The first way to reduce plaque build-up is to reduce the amount of LDL cholesterol available to be oxidized in the first place. Reducing cholesterol is the focus of most of our traditional efforts at preventing heart disease. Cholesterol reduction is the primary reason so many millions are on statin drugs like Lipitor.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 1
We all want to live long, happy and healthy lives – and taking care of our hearts is an essential part of good health and longevity. In this blog I want to tell you a bit about cholesterol and how this complex substance relates to heart disease. In an upcoming blog we’ll look at how to prevent the build-up of the wrong kinds of cholesterol so that we can maintain or restore good heart health.
There was a time when doctors thought of cholesterol as a single compound. We now know that cholesterol actually comes in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and the names we give to these types are based on their density. The lightest and most buoyant cholesterol is now classed as “very low density lipoprotein” or VLDL. For a variety of reasons, VLDL is the most problematic form of cholesterol you can have in your bloodstream. The second common form of cholesterol is abbreviated “LDL,” which stands for low-density lipoprotein. This form of cholesterol is the most