50 Ways to a Healthy Heart - Softcover

Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world's first heart transplant, offers realistic common-sense advice. He recommends the old stalwarts regular exercise, eating a Mediterranean-style diet, not smoking and so on, but adds his own ideas as well. These not-so-obvious (and really quite fun) ideas include: enjoying regular sex, taking a three-week vacation every year, and getting a grip on one's emotional life. A German who resides in South Africa, Barnard also believes in herbs and mineral supplements as heart health boosters, supplements Americans have been slower to recognize. But while many of Barnard's tips may be helpful for everyone, the book is aimed primarily at men even though heart disease is a mjor killer of American women. For example, there's an entire chapter about male potency issues entitled, "Take Viagra." Female sexual issues are addressed only peripherally. Likewise, there's a chapter on the benefits of drinking two glasses of red wine each day never mentioning recent findings linking alcohol with an increase in breast cancer in women. While it's certainly not Barnard's fault that most medical studies are performed with men as subjects, he does owe his female readers information as well. Still, his tips are direct and positive, and are generally easy enough to integrate into one's life.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The South African surgeon who performed the first heart transplant proves an exceptionally winning health advisor. That's good, because this book of 50 injunctively titled chapters--"Eat Vitamins," "Enjoy Sex," "Don't Hide Grief," and so forth--looks rather like the same-old same-old on heart care, complete with tips, checklists, steps for doing this or that, provocative pull-quotes, and the rest of the drill. But Barnard's authoritative-but-not-impersonal, serious-but-not-solemn, conversational manner makes learning from him a pleasure. Sensible rather than zealous, he advises, for instance, eating less, not going on a diet, as the first step in losing weight. He fosters individual creativity by, for instance, counseling readers to "create your own stress." And he isn't afraid of provoking belly laughs: one of his tips for eliminating passive cigarette smoke is "Smoke cigars. Strangely, cigarette smokers don't much like cigar smoke." Perhaps his Briticisms ("sport" instead of "sports") and occasional loose grammar will pique pedants, but he justifies Thorsons' confident 75,000-copy first printing. Once they read the book, readers will want to keep it. Ray Olson
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