Your purchase of this book means that you're probably aware that heart disease kills more than 500,000 people in the United States every year. Death was the first symptom for 40 percent of those people. This insidious disease forever alters the lives of an additional one million heart attack survivors each year. Survivors and their families find their lives shaped by the brush with death even when recovery is "complete." Thousands whose recoveries are not so complete will face shortened life spans, with their remaining years plagued by pain, fear and disability.
"Oh!" These people say, "If only I could have prevented the disease in the first place!"
Prevention is so important because, despite the dramatic decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease (about 40 percent in the U.S. in the past three decades), the incidence of heart attacks is roughly the same. Fewer people are dying mostly because medical treatment has improved, not because fewer people are getting sick.
What's more, the sophisticated medical treatments to save these people -- transplants, bypass surgery, angioplasty, clot-busting drugs -- are enormously expensive. They are frequently just temporary fixes, especially when the victims fail to make the eating, drinking and lifestyle changes that helped cause the disease in the first place.
Most people who fail to make these changes (either before or after a heart attack) do so because it requires radical alterations in their lifestyles involving extensive, time- consuming food preparation that, after all the effort, produces bland, unsatisfying meals.
Either consciously or subconsciously, many people fail to follow prevention techniques because they feel that a few more years of a life of deprivation may not be worth the effort.
In the United States people are working more hours and so turn to fast, frozen or prepared foods to salve the hunger in their stressed, time-pressed lives. The situation is aggravated because people think -- incorrectly, we believe -- that they don't have time to prepare a tasty, healthy meal from fresh ingredients.
That's why every recipe or lifestyle change technique in this book will take less than 60 minutes to accomplish.
This book was prompted by a gathering mountain of scientific research into a phenomenon known as "The French Paradox," which was dramatically reported on Nov. 17, 1991, on a segment of the CBS News program 60 Minutes. Simply put, the French Paradox means that the French (and most other people in the Mediterranean region) have 40 percent fewer heart attacks than Americans although they:
-- smoke tobacco prodigiously,
-- exercise little,
-- eat large amounts of fat,
-- have the same, or slightly higher, blood cholesterol levels and
-- spend far less per capita on health care.
Scores of research studies indicate that the French have fewer heart attacks because they:
-- regularly drink moderate amounts of alcohol, particularly red wine, with meats,
-- eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and
-- take more time with their meals and with meal preparation.
We believe that the less you have to alter your life, the more likely you are to make the changes.
Old habits die hard, psychologists tell us, because the habits serve a purpose in your life. We realize that American society prevents most of us from living the lifestyle of a French or Italian or Greek peasant and their slower-paced lives filled with long midday meals and wine. But we will offer you solid, easily- accomplished ways of integrating important elements of this healthy lifestyle into your busy American life.
Our lives are uncertain in so many ways. We would love to know with certainty that if we do something or abstain from something that we will be healthier, live longer, avoid cancer, heart attacks and so forth.
But most scientific studies don't offer clear, black-and-white conclusions. They offer information based on the study of large numbers of individuals in a given population -- whether of mice or men and women. These studies are estimates based on effects of the studied population as a whole and cannot be applied with certainty to a given individual.
Whether these are studies to determine the effectiveness of a treatment, to determine the appropriate dose of a given antibiotic (or even common drugs like aspirin) or to determine which lifestyles are healthier, they are actually research- backed, highly-educated guesses that the chances are good that a specific course of treatment will work.
Thus, your doctor cannot guarantee with 100 percent certainty that lowering your cholesterol will prevent a heart attack, that a particular antibiotic will cure your infection, that aspirin won't kill you, that angioplasty will cure your coronary artery blockage, or that you won't be the 1-in-10,OOO who will die of a reaction to general anesthesia in a dentist's chair.
All a doctor or dentist -- or you -- can do is refer to the research and determine that, in the population studied, a given treatment has a stated chance of producing a desired result.
This means we know that large populations of people who take aspirin have an excellent chance of reducing pain; that studies of large numbers of people show that Tetracycline is effective in curing certain bacterial infection, and that population studies show that people who regularly consume approximately two glasses of wine per day have as little as half the death rate from heart attacks as either abstainers or heavy drinkers.
While engaging in these treatments or behaviors doesn't guarantee that your headache will be cured by aspirin or that moderate drinking will prevent your heart attack, the research does say that if you adopt them, you will place yourself in the same situation as the tested population and therefore increase your chances of benefiting.
In addition, studies are often flawed, incomplete or conflict with each other. In these cases, you must weigh the pluses and minuses of each to make an intelligent and informed decision.
There are many people in the government, in private anti-alcohol advocacy groups as well as some in the alcoholic beverage industry who have vested interests in twisting or hiding research data to support their own agendas. The general media's lack of time (or reluctance) to tell a complete story only makes things worse when you try to base your own lifestyle choices on flawed information.
We will give you some practical ways in which you can evaluate new medical research and determine who is trying to lie to you.. and why.