Is salt really bad for you?

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’re having a wonderful time with friends and family. I also hope you’re eating plenty of great food. And I hope you’re enjoying it well-salted.

What? Am I crazy? Won’t salt give you high blood pressure and heart problems? That’s what they told me when I was in medical school way back in the 1960s. They told me that patients with heart disease, especially those with heart failure, need to be very careful to restrict salt intake.

Virtually eliminate your risk of sudden death from a heart attack

Did you know that the most common symptom for heart attacks is sudden death? That’s right. Most people never know what hit them. But you can virtually eliminate your risk of sudden cardiac death. And it’s easy to do.

While this study was on women (the long ongoing Nurses Health Study), I promise you that it applies to men.

Researchers conducted a prospective analysis of 81,722 U.S. women from June 1984 to June 2010. They based their analysis on four “low-risk factors.” These four included: not smoking, body mass index of less than 25, exercise duration of 30 minutes/day or longer, and top 40% of the alternate Mediterranean diet score. 

Cancer center promises longer, better life — can they deliver?

On Wednesday, I told you the best way to treat cancer is with an integrative approach. I’ve had great success with this approach, as have many of my colleagues. But there’s a more mainstream organization that’s having success with it as well. In fact, their success rate with breast cancer is significantly better than conventional treatments alone.

The Cancer Treatment Centers of America has a different story. They posted a comparison of their advanced breast cancer patients to those women who undergo conventional therapy only. Their total numbers were small (only 71 women). But the differences in survival are so great that they are statistically significant!