Protect Your Heart with Wine and Chocolate

If women would drink a glass of red wine a day and eat an ounce of dark chocolate, they could help reduce their risk of heart disease by 54 percent, says a new book.

Heal Your Heart with Wine and Chocolate . . . and 99 other ways women can protect their hearts is written by veteran health journalist Debora Yost, who reviewed all the scientific research and literature exclusive to women and heart disease and interviewed the top experts in heart health to come up with 101 scientifically based dietary and lifestyle practices that uniquely appeal to women.

“The book is an empowering self-help book for women because it focuses only on the positive things women can do to enhance their heart health,” says Leslie Stoker, president and publisher. The book points to the differences between men and women and the way they accumulate many heart risks. Many of the ways to avoid these risks are just as different.

Nancy Loving, Executive Director for the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease (WomenHeart), who wrote the foreword for the book, is actively campaigning this month – heart month – to increase awareness that heart disease, not breast cancer, is the number one killer of women in America and worldwide. In Heal Your Heart with Wine and Chocolate, Yost cites some startling statistics:

--Only 13 percent of America women considered heart disease a personal threat.
--Only 1 out of 5 doctors, including cardiologists, know heart disease is the major killer of women, according to a recent survey.
--Heart disease kills six times as many women as breast cancer and twice as many women as all forms of cancer combined.

The book offers advice on wonderful things to eat and fun ways to get exercise, but the big message to women is their need to focus more on taking care of themselves instead of only taking care of others. “Most men can’t even relate to the type of heart-damaging stress that affects women,” says Yost. Though most heart research until recently has been conducted exclusively on men, Yost said she found enough evidence though recent studies and anecdotally from doctors to come up with 101 solid ways women can improve their heart health.