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THE HEART DISEASE BREAKTHROUGH

Name: THE HEART DISEASE BREAKTHROUGH
Author: M.D. Yannios
ISBN: 0-471-25533-5

WHAT EVEN YOUR DOCTOR DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT PREVENTING A HEART ATTACK

by M.D. Yannios ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 1999

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For those seriously concerned with preventing heart disease, this is your guide: detailed, current, strongly worded guidelines. Yannios, associate director of critical care and nutritional support at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, N.Y., isn’t interested in cushioning the facts or the remedies in a feel-good framework—his horrifying case stories are successfully designed to propel readers into action, and he backs them up with the grim facts: most Americans already have well-advanced atherosclerosis by their 20s; low-fat diets “can actually raise cholesterol and increase risk in certain groups of people”; more than half the people who have heart attacks have total cholesterol levels under 200. So the remedy for those in peril, according to Yannios, takes some real work: assess your own risk; then, with the help of a physician, take advantage of the newest blood tests and make a stringent action plan—guidelines are set out here—involving diet, weight control, exercise, and medication. Yannios doesn’t let readers off easily, but that doesn’t mean he can’t offer realistic help: for instance, “practically every cardiac risk factor can be countered by exercise——it just has to be the right type of exercise. Heart disease prevention is among the fastest-advancing medical research areas, with new, often conflicting recommendations being published daily. For those at serious risk, this is an understandable, serious, and worthwhile approach.

Pub Date: April 23, 1999

ISBN: 0-471-25533-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Wiley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999

Categories:

HEALTH & FITNESS

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GETTING OVER GETTING OLDER

AN INTIMATE JOURNEY

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

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Yet another feminist offers an up-close and personal examination of trekking into middle age. Pogrebin's (Deborah, Golda, and Me, 1991, etc.) friends groaned when they heard she was writing about aging; how depressing, they thought. Readers may groan as well at the prospect of another paean to growing older. But Pogrebin, now 56, brings some fresh insights to the process, particularly in a discussion of what time means once you're over the hill. Pogrebin places herself in that small cohort born between 1932, when FDR was elected president, and 1945, the end of WW II. She labels this group ``the Roosevelt babies,'' calling them (and herself) ``unself-conscious trailblazers,'' mapping the territory of longevity for the Boomers. ``Time is all there is,'' she says, so don't hoard it or waste it trying to recapture youth. ``Use it or lose it'' is but one piece of T-shirt advice that she passes along, in company with poetry and observations from May Sarton, Simone de Beauvoir, and feminist peers from her early years at Ms. magazine. Often setting herself apart from what she views as the unrelentingly positive feminist party line on aging, she hails the value of nostalgia in a section on memory and praises diet, exercise, and hormone replacement therapy in chapters on the aging body. She also speculates on whether the public discouse on menopause will stigmatize older women as the mysteries of menstruation and PMS once kept young women in their place. In the end, Pogrebin is reconciled to the idea of dying, if not to the fact of death. While there is undeniably much that is thoughtful and useful in this volume, it's often buried in anecdotes about family and friends less interesting to general readers than to the author.