Heart disease kills more people than any other disease. Major causes of heart attacks include cigarette smoking, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. You can also inherit defective genes from your father or mother that will increase your risk of having a heart attack. 

You can control what you eat but your genetic make up is beyond your control. This turns out NOT to be true. 

A large study screened a population of 8000 Europeans, Chinese, South Asians, Arabs, and Latin Americans for genetic defects on chromosome 9 in the p21 region. They looked for four specific defects in a single DNA building block (single nucleotide polymorphisms).

Sodium chloride and potassium chloride are both simple salts but they have profoundly different effects in the body. In the blood stream, sodium is high (135 mg/dl) and potassium is low (4 mg/dl) but the opposite is true inside cells where potassium is high and sodium is low.

Both sodium and potassium are diet essentials, but in the United States we get far more sodium than we need and barely enough potassium.This causes a significant increase in deaths from heart disease.

The U.S. Government just published a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine examining the ratio of sodium to potassium in the diet and the impact on several diseases and death, in more than 12,000 people who were followed for 15 years. During this time there were 2270 deaths.

Studies that focus on huge numbers of the population are an important scientific tool. When you enroll hundreds of thousands of participants and track them for several years, you collect a mountain of data.

The results of large studies covering large geographic areas can be generalized to the entire population. Their findings represent the truth about the topic that was researched. The conclusions can’t be challenged.

Cigarette smoking causes more deaths worldwide than any other environmental factor.

Lung cancer leads a parade of other smoking-related cancers. Undoubtedly, the best way to reduce the disease and death that come from cigarettes is to just quit smoking. But there are other healthy choices you can make as well.

A diet with a variety of fruits and vegetables reduces the risk of developing lung cancer by 27% in cigarette smokers. This information comes from a study of nearly half a million adults across 10 European countries, and was just published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

I like really big population studies. The conclusions reached are valid and extremely accurate. Small studies with few participants are subject to many types of bias. The results of small studies are often debatable and not dependable.

The second Nurses’ Health Study enrolled 83,882 adult women 27-44 years of age. At the beginning of the study in 1991, all these women had normal blood pressure, (systolic 120 or less and diastolic 80 or less), and no diabetes, heart disease or cancer. These women were followed for 14 years through 2005. During the study, 12, 319 women developed high blood pressure and the rest didn’t.

A few weeks ago I received a very enthusiastic phone call from a person who expressed great enthusiasm for PositiveChoices.com. Of course, it is always nice to hear this kind of excitement! However, it wasn't long before he revealed the true purpose of his call. He wanted us to place a link to his website where he sold the "best nutritional supplements in the world." His site promised health and great wealth to all who would promote these "natural God-given nutrients in a liquid."