Heart Health Items from Pages

Chocolate lovers rejoice

A U.S. and Swedish study shows that heart-attack patients who had eaten chocolate at least twice a week during the year prior to hospitalization were 66 percent less likely to die.

The higher the cocoa content in chocolate, the greater the protection. In the United States, milk chocolate has 10 percent cocoa content; dark chocolate has 15 percent. In Sweden, it’s 25 percent for milk chocolate, 35 percent for dark.

Prevent heart problems, diabetes, more

Being just “a little more fit” improves longevity, quality of life .

What have you done recently to improve your fitness level?

You might think that because you have exercised off and on throughout your life that you are in pretty good shape. Don’t rest on your laurels.

An extensive study by a New Zealand university, cooperating with Stanford in the United States, shows that overall exercise habits during adult life didn’t matter very much when it came to current fitness levels.

Recent activity, during the last 16 weeks, was more important.

The doctors followed several thousand middle-aged and older Americans for about nine years. Study subjects were divided into five groups ranging from the least fit to the most fit.

By the end of the study, those who were most fit were the least likely to have died or develop a life-threatening disease. No surprise there.

What did surprise the researchers was the improved outlook between the least fit and those on the next level. They discovered that being just a little more physically active was associated with a big improvement.

At any level, especially the least-fit category, moving up just one more will make a big difference in your life.

Add a little more activity to your day for the next four months and you could prevent a heart attack, diabetes and other serious conditions.

No more than 5 to 9 teaspoons a day

The American Heart Association recommends cutting back on sugar.

The heavier you are, the more work your heart has to do. That’s one reason why the American Heart Association is looking for the causes of weight gain and obesity.

At this time, they are focusing on sugar. It is one of the main culprits in the rising obesity rates in the United States. The association wants everyone to cut way back on added sugar in their diets.

For the first time since 2006, it is presenting new guidelines that recommend sugars added in processing, cooking or at the table total no more than 100 calories a day for women and 150 calories a day for men. That’s five to nine teaspoons.

It’s a drastic reduction from the 22 teaspoons per day in the present American diet, which is a total of 355 calories. The amount of sugar in the American diet has increased by 19 percent since 1970.

One can of non-diet soda can put a woman over the limit. Sweetened drinks are the main cause of increased sugar consumption since 1970.

D2B (door to balloon) effort

In heart attacks, doctors knew for many years that clearing clogged arteries within 90 minutes saves lives. But only half of heart attack patients were treated with angioplasty in that time frame.

Angioplasty involves inflating a narrow balloon in the clogged blood vessel to clear it. A heart deprived of blood by a blood clot soon begins to die.

In 2006, American College of Cardiology and 38 other groups started the campaign to improve treatment times.

The Journal of the American College of Cardiology now reports that nearly 80 percent of heart attack patients get angioplasty within 90 minutes. They want to drive the time down more, down so far that all damage is prevented and it’s as if there were never a heart attack.