Vowing To Improve Your Health In 2019? These Less Common Ways Might Help More Than Quick Weight Loss

Instead of a crash diet, try getting more sleep, changing when you eat, finding friends off of Facebook, exercising more, talking with your doctor and finding ways to reduce stress. Other nutrition and fitness news focuses on fad diets, dry January, heart failure and moderate drinking, safe HDL levels, heart attacks and stroke, designer meals and more.

The Wall Street Journal: The Dry January Effect Bottoms down: It’s Dry January. For Heather Molnar that means holding the gin in her gin and tonic for the rest of the month and substituting that end-of-day glass of wine with kombucha. “I like to put it in a wine glass or something fancy,” says Ms. Molnar, a 46-year-old content strategist who lives in Morris Plains, N.J. (Reddy, 1/1)

The New York Times: Moderate Drinking May Benefit Heart Failure Patients Patients with heart failure may live longer if they have a few alcoholic drinks a week, a new study suggests. Studies on the effect of alcohol on the risk of heart failure have had mixed results, with some suggesting an increased risk with more than about seven drinks a week. But this is the first study to look at drinking after a heart failure diagnosis. (Bakalar, 12/28)

The New York Times: HDL Cholesterol: Too Much Of A Good Thing? I used to be thrilled that my blood level of HDL cholesterol, the so-called good cholesterol, was high, the likely result of my devotion to daily physical activity. After all, HDL, for high-density lipoprotein, acts like an arterial cleanser, removing cholesterol from blood vessels and preparing it for removal outside the body. An ample supply of HDL cholesterol in blood serum has long been linked to protection against coronary heart disease and stroke, so what could be bad? (Brody, 12/24)

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