Word: effects
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...meal of only white bread. Eat some vinegar with the bread, however, and the impact is dampened: The vinegar slows digestion, helping to keep blood-sugar levels more even. The same thing happens if a person takes his bread with nuts or with a glass of wine. (The dampening effect of alcohol reverses after more than a couple units, which may help to explain why moderate drinking, but not heavy drinking, is associated with long life.) The common denominator of all these slow-release foods, says O'Keefe, is a generally high nutritive value with low calories. The healthy foods...
...patty, French fries and a Coke - the rush of sugar causes something called "post-prandial hyperglycemia": a big spike in blood-sugar levels. Poor diet in the long-term leads to hypertension and buildup of gunk in blood vessels that increases heart-attack risk. But there are short-term effects too. "People don't understand this, even most physicians," says O'Keefe. Tissue becomes inflamed, just as it does when infected. Blood vessels constrict. Free radicals, unstable molecules that cause cell damage and are thought to contribute to chronic disease and aging, are generated. The body's stress response...
...long-awaited heart drug Vytorin - and the news wasn't good. Vytorin's manufacturers, Merck and Schering-Plough, announced that while the drug reduced levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol, in a group of 750 patients, the medication, which has been on the market since 2004, had little effect on the buildup of plaque in the arteries, a harbinger of heart attack and stroke...
...even there, Vytorin failed to show much effect. Vytorin is actually the combination of two drugs - one of the early statin medications, simvastatin (also known as Zocor), made by Merck, and ezetimibe, or Zetia, made by Schering-Plough. Ezetimibe is the first cholesterol-lowering medication that works by blocking absorption of cholesterol in the gut, rather than regulating the fat's production in the liver, like other statins do. ENHANCE compared the effect of Vytorin to simvastatin alone, and showed little difference between the two medications when it came to plaque size in the arteries. Simvastatin came off patent...
ENHANCE may only be the opening salvo against Vytorin - three larger trials are currently under way to measure the drug's effect on heart attack and stroke - and many physicians are not optimistic. "Given these results, it's highly unlikely that those outcomes studies will show dramatic benefit for Vytorin," notes Dr. Raymond Gibbons of the Mayo Clinic, and past president of the American Heart Association...