Entries by Chet Zelasko

The Best Heart-Healthy Diet

In assessing popular diets to find out which one follows the AHA heart-healthy dietary guidelines the best, the panel did a credible job. Instead of just using their expertise, which is substantial, they developed an objective way of assessing each popular diet. They did have one diet that received a point for each of the […]

How Popular Diets Impact Your Heart

When the American Heart Association (AHA) speaks, news organizations tend to report what they say and people tend to listen. It’s doubly true when they rank all the popular diets according to how they relate to heart health. Because we seem to live in a society based on the “see food, eat food” diet, that […]

How Fasting Impacts Your Mitochondria

The research scientist in the webinar focused on mitochondria and aging in his part of the presentation. He has helped research and develop a nutrient that appears to help with mitophagy, the process of removing and replenishing old mitochondria. The naturally produced chemical is called urolithin A. It’s produced naturally by the microbiome in response […]

Dietary Supplements: Certified

Recently I watched a webinar on mitochondrial health and athletic performance co-sponsored by the American College of Sports Medicine and a nutritional company. The speakers were a clinical researcher and a PhD dietitian for a professional basketball team. I’m going to review what the clinical researcher talked about on Saturday. Today I’m going to focus […]

How Coffee Relates to CVD

Researchers in Germany used a unique approach in the Hamburg City Health Study: they selected the first 10,000 volunteers. Volunteers who didn’t drink coffee were eliminated from the study, so they ended up with 9,009 subjects. The researchers collected dietary data along with a variety of other demographic and physiological variables, integrating lifestyle-related behavior, comorbidities, […]

Research Update: Coffee and Heart Rhythms

In one of the first jobs I ever had, the foreman would pour a half-cup of coffee and fill it up with water; he’d had a heart attack and his doctor told him to limit his coffee intake. Fifty years ago, physicians recommended that people avoid coffee if they had high blood pressure or had […]

Dealing with the Chemicals in Our Lives

We began this journey with the EWG Dirty Dozen, examined common chemicals we come in contact with such as TCE, and looked at the latest threat—PFAS. These chemicals are ubiquitous, so we’re left with the challenge of how to protect ourselves. In reality, this is nothing new. Every home and business dumped waste into the […]

Chemicals in Our Water

Here’s one for you to mull over. We’ve been exposed to this chemical group since the 1940s. It’s not just one chemical such as TCE from Saturday’s Memo; there are thousands of forms of these chemicals. Based on samples from large groups of people, over 98% of us have them in our bodies; they’re found […]

Chemicals in Our Environment

We have always lived in a world of chemicals. Some were always part of the planet, such as water and the minerals in the earth; more and more, they’re made by humans when they convert raw materials into chemicals that we can use. As you can imagine, the problem is that whether raw or processed, […]

Chemicals in Foods

The last Memo focused on nutrients from foods versus nutrients from supplements. Coincidently, a long-time reader sent me a link to an article about the Dirty Dozen, recently published by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Paula also sent me articles to read on our exposure to chemicals in cleaning products and our environment. As a […]