AMA #68: Fasting, well-balanced diets, alcohol, exercise for busy people, wearables, emotional health, assessing cardiovascular health, and more

We know pretty unambiguously at this point that having a blood pressure below 120/80 is absolutely the lowest risk and is the best way to reduce one's risk [of cardiovascular disease]...

Once you start to get into the high-volume drinkers—these are people that are drinking three to four drinks per day—and then the highest volume drinkers are over four drinks per day, these people start to see an uptick in their all-cause mortality at 20 and 35%, respectively, relative to the people who abstain.

The good news is that you don't have to concern yourselves with LDL cholesterol, non-HDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol. None of those things actually matter once you know the ApoB and Lp(a). In fact, the triglyceride level itself doesn't matter unless it's dramatically elevated sort of north of about 400 mg/dL...

I can tell you, having done more food logs with more patients than I can count, it is always amazing to see a patient's face when they recognize that 25% of their total calories come from alcohol if they're a moderate to heavy drinker.

Across the board, women fare worse with respect to alcohol than men.

I think, overall, we can say that alcohol is under no dose helpful, under low doses probably not terribly really bad, but under escalating doses it's actually quite negative.

When you see people perishing really young from cardiovascular disease, or when you see them requiring procedures... especially at a young age, you have to be thinking about heritable causes of a ASCVD. And again, the two most common are going to be L(a) and some form of familial hypercholesterolemia.