Pistachios May Help Lower Bad Cholesterol

A new study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has found that eating pistachios may help lower levels of bad cholesterol. For the study, researchers recruited 28 adults who had high levels of bad (LDL) cholesterol and had them eat three different diets for one month each. The first was a low-fat diet without pistachios, the second was a healthy diet with one daily serving of pistachios, and the third was the healthy diet with two daily servings of pistachios. investigators found that the participants' bad cholesterol levels dropped by 9 percent during the month they ate one serving of the nuts per day, and by 12 percent the month they ate two servings per day.  Read full story >

(The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) 

True Health Is True Wealth

OCD Drives Man To Mac Attack - 23.000 Times

updated 7:37 a.m. PT, Tues., Sept. 9, 2008

54-year-old says OCD drove him to eat a burger nearly every day since 1972

FOND DU LAC, Wis. - A 54-year-old man says his obsessive-compulsive disorder drove him to eat 

Fifty-four-year-old Don Gorske says he hit the milestone last month, continuing a pleasurable obsession that began May 17, 1972 when he got his first car.

Gorske has kept every burger receipt in a box. He says he was always fascinated with numbers, and watching McDonald's track its number of customers motivated him to track his own consumption.

The only day he skipped a Big Mac was the day his mother died, to respect her request. 

The correctional-institution employee says he doesn't care when people call his Big Mac obsession crazy. He says he's in love with the burgers, which are the highlights of his days.

"When the well is dry, we know the worth of water."  ...Benjamin Franklin

Don't Wait Until You're Thirsty...

Water is so important for life that we can survive days, weeks, maybe even months without food but only days without water. The human body is about 55 to 70 percent water, and no bodily function takes place without water. Water is the most important and most abundant natural resource, yet it is also the one we take for granted the most.

"Life-Critical Nutrient"

Here's How You'll Beat Those Odds ...

 Each and every cell in your body calls out for this unique nutrient ...

You see, it's responsible for the production of all of your body's hormones. You also need it for your immune system to work properly.

With insufficient amounts, you could end up with cancer, multiple sclerosis, or a host of other diseases.

Your government tells you not to worry ... they say you get an adequate supply of it in your diet, because of a policy they instituted in the 1920's.

But do you?

Consider this — over the last 30 years, body levels of this life-saving nutrient have dropped by nearly 50% in the United States — despite the government's best efforts.

Our new Newsmax medical editor, Dr. David Brownstein, has tested over 4,000 patients in his clinic. His findings have been shocking — 96.5% tested low for this critical substance.

This nutrient is the missing link to your good health. Yet it's something you probably never give a thought to.

It's the most misunderstood nutrient out there ...

It's iodine.

Special 2008 Health Update
by Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax CEO

Protect Yourself From Killer Hospitals... Part 2

Emergency Rooms

In June many of us witnessed (after the fact and via hospital surveilance camera footage) Esmin Green, a 49-year-old mother of six, tumble off her chair onto the floor of the Kings County psychiatric E.R. waiting room in New York City. Members of the hospital staff saw her lying there but did nothing for about an hour. When Green was finally brought into the E.R., she was dead. An autopsy revealed that she died from a pulmonary embolism, which occurs when a blood clot forms in the leg, breaks off, and travels to one or both lungs. This can also occur and kill long-haul airplane passengers who sit in one spot for hours: The blood sits stagnant in their legs for so long that it clots. Green had been on her own plane ride of sorts. She'd waited for a psychiatric-unit bed to open up for more than 24 hours, roughly the same flight time as a trip from New York to Tanzania.

The surveillance video of Green collapsing and lying untended, as hospital staff at Kings County fail to respond to her collapse, is inexcusable by any stretch of the imagination, causing Nancy Grace, for one, to focus on the negligence. But what's largely missing from this story is the likely cause of Green's pulmonary embolism. The answer lies in a far more systematic and widespread danger in hospital care: E.R. waits. Why was Green sitting and waiting while blood pooled in her legs? Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can be hazardous to your health, hospitals have incentives to keep their E.R. patients waiting. As a result, there has been an explosion in E.R. wait times over the past few years, even for those who are the sickest.

A major cause for E.R. crowding is the hospital practice of boarding inpatients in emergency departments. This happens when patients who come to the E.R. need to be admitted overnight. If there are no inpatient beds in the hospital (or no extra inpatient nurses on duty that day) then the patient stays in the E.R. long past the completion of the initial emergency work. This is what happened to Green, and it has become widespread and common. The problem is that boarding shifts E.R. resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. While E.R. patients wait for inpatient beds, new patients wait longer to see a doctor. As more new patients come, the waits grow. And an E.R. filled with boarding patients and a full waiting room is an unhappy E.R.:

The atmosphere is at once static and chaotic. If you or a loved one has waited for hours in an E.R., you know what we mean. The environment can be unsafe and even deadly.

This practice of "bed-hiding" is also becoming a common practice.

Emergency Room Germs

And then of course we know that Emergency Rooms, like doctor's offices only multiplied, are virtual peetrie dishes of every type of germ imaginable. So even though a trip to the E.R. is sometimes unavoidble, avoiding one if it is not imperative, is vital to your health.

• If at all possible go to your family doctor or an urgent care, unless it is a true emergency.


• If it is a true emergency call an ambulance; ambulance patients are attended first.


• If at all possible, do not take well children or infants to the E.R.


• Take hand-sanitizers with you and use them throughout your stay.


• Try not to eat in the E.R.


• If you are not the patient and have a long E.R. stay, take regular fresh air breaks outside.


• If you or someone you love is left sitting or lying in the E.R. for hours, complain!

A recent study found that critically ill patients who spend more than six hours in the E.R. are 4 percent more likely to die.

Part 3 Continued Tomorrow

Source: Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M/Posted on Slate.com

Protect Yourself From Killer Hospitals... Part I

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.” …Mark Twain ;-)

(Although this is not 100% true, we are at least in part the authors to our own health or disease based on our choices.)

But, There's no place more deadly than a hospital...

This is a universal and unspoken truth in the health care community: hospitals can be lethal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 99,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired infections; and not just the sick, the elderly, or the very young.

Case in point: 27-year-old Joshua Nahum was injured during a skydiving accident. Considering he voluntarily jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, Nahum was probably considered very lucky to have escaped the incident with only fractures to his skull and femur. And over six weeks in a Colorado intensive care unit, Nahum slowly improved. Doctors declared that with a complete course of rehab, Nahum would be fully recovered in just two years. Yet just two weeks after the doctors gave him the good news, Nahum was dead. A bacterial infection he developed while in the hospital had killed him. In the wake of this devastating (and, if you ask me, needless) tragedy, Victoria Nahum, Josh's stepmother, founded the Safe Care Campaign, the goal of which is to stop health-care- and community-acquired infections.

According to the Safe Care Campaign's Web site, the organization seeks to "instigate a crucial culture change within the American health care environment with regard to comprehensive infection prevention and hand-hygiene compliance practices." It's shocking, but true - one of the biggest and most dangerous myths around is the sterility of hospitals. The places are awash in all manner of germs that can be devastating to people whose immune systems are compromised because they are recovering from illnesses or surgeries. Contrary to their squeaky-clean image, hospitals are far from sterile places. In fact, they're among the most hazardous with regard to infections. Remember, hospitals are where all the sick people are, which means they're where all the GERMS are.

But what's even more disturbing than this is the fact that hospitals can expose you to different germs than what you'd come into contact with in the outside world. Because bacteria can mutate so quickly, those that linger in hospitals can develop into distinct variants that can have a strong resistance to antibiotics. That makes them much more lethal than the garden-variety microbes you're exposed to every day out in the world.

Thanks to people like the Nahums and other concerned patient advocate groups, the word is getting out about the potential dangers that lie within hospitals. In addition to the Safe Care Campaign, there's also the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths (CRID), which was begun by former lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey. "You don't often come across such a big problem that you can prevent," McCaughey said.

These groups have a steep hill to climb. In addition to noncompliance to hygiene standards by hospital staffs and the bacteriological soup that's contained in hospitals, the dangers are not going away. So the Safe Care Campaign and the CRID have come up with a list of advice that patients can follow to help protect themselves when they head to the hospital.

Part II Continued Tomorrow....