Lawyer, Protect Your Heart

The risk factors for heart disease are well-established: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, abdominal obesity, and sedentary living. Earlier this year, though, New York Times health columnist Jane Brody reported that researchers are unraveling the biochemical reasons for most heart attacks, and the advice for avoiding them is changing … and may surprise you.

Brody reports that a relatively new factor has emerged that may be even more important as a cause of heart attacks than, say, high blood levels of artery-damaging cholesterol. That factor is C-reactive protein, or CRP. She writes that it is a blood-borne marker of inflammation that, along with coagulation factors, is now increasingly recognized as the driving force behind clots that block blood flow to the heart.

The Times columnist reports that the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet is especially effective at reducing CRP, and that among the most helpful foods are cold-water fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel), flax seed, walnuts, canola oil, and canola-based margarine. Other aspects of the Mediterranean diet – vegetables, fruits, and red wine (or purple grape juice) are helpful as well.

Brody quoted Dr. Michael Ozner, medical director of the Cardiovascular Prevention Institute of South Florida, as saying, “When the diet is stripped of lots of processed floods, you ratchet down inflammation”, the driving force behind clots that block flood flow to the heart.

In fact, one study found that within four years, the so-called Mediterranean approach reduced the rates of heart disease recurrence and cardiac death by 50 to 70 percent when compared with the traditional heart association diet.