“Margaret,” Laurie called out as she rounded the end of the last aisle in the grocery store.

“Hi, Laurie,” Margaret responded as she placed a bottle of Bordeaux wine in her shopping cart.

“I didn’t know you liked wine.” Laurie, basket on her arm, tried to speak without accusation as she approached Margaret’s shopping cart. “I thought you were an abstainer.”

“Oh, I was – until I saw the most recent study about the good effects of red wine,” Margaret said. “You know, lowering cholesterol, decreasing clots, better heart health.” Margaret seemed quite confident.

Laurie wrinkled her brow, trying to recall what she had read. “Good effects? I did read something about that in a magazine – or on-line somewhere, but I don’t remember the details.”

“Yeah. It’s all about the resveratrol in wine. You know about that?”

“Um, I remember resveratrol,” Margaret nodded. “A magical element in red grapes.”

Sugary drinks create heart risks for women even if they are normal weight. This is the finding of a study presented at the American Heart Association meetings in Florida by Dr. Christina Shay.

In this study, 4000 women from 45-84 years of age were followed for 5 years. Women who drank two or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day were compared to women who drank one or less daily. 

Women drinking two or more sugary drinks per day were four times as likely to develop high triglycerides. This was true for skinny women as well as those who were overweight. Elevated triglycerides are a risk factor for heart disease. So, sodas in the daily diet can clog your arteries, leading to heart attacks and death. 

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.

For thousands of years humans have fallen to the illnesses served up by nature's villains. Infectious disease such as bubonic plague, malaria and tuberculosis have killed millions. But the tables have turned -- we are now killing ourselves at a higher rate than nature is killing us.

The World Health Organization reveals this in the Global Status Report on Noncommunicable Diseases. Each year, of the 57 million deaths in the world, 63% (36 million) are now from self-inflicted causes. Four specific risk factors were identified: (1) tobacco, (2) alcohol, (3) lack of exercise, and (4) poor eating habits. 

Around the world, one billion adults are overweight. This will rise to 1.5 billion by 2015. Of children under 5 years of age, 40 million are overweight or obese.

The American Heart Association (AHA) has revised and updated its guidelines for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in women. No longer are the terms "low risk" and "intermediate risk" used. Women are either classified as having "ideal risk," or being "at risk" or "high risk."

Think you are at low or ideal cardiovascular risk? Low/ideal risk women are defined as having all seven characteristics:

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.

Two simple measurements have been found accurately predict the development of coronary heart disease. One is measuring the distance around the waist at the level of the belly button and the second is measuring blood triglyceride levels.

This research was just published based on a study of 25,668 men and women in Norfolk, United Kingdom.