The Right Amount to Drink

Don't miss any Bottom Line Secrets. Add our address, bottomlinesecrets@ebls.bottomlinesecrets.com, to your Address Book or Safe List. Learn how here. April 15, 2011 The Drugs No Senior Should Ever Take When Not to Clean Your Oven Blood Pressure 'Switch' Found on Human Body... The Right Way to Drink Wine Secret to Reversing Arthritis Pain Dear healthwellness82@gmail.com, We love our appliances and the convenience they bring -- until they break down. Expert appliance repairman Vernon Schmidt, author of The Appliance Handbook for Women: Simple Enough Even Men Can Understand, shares five secrets you won’t find in the instruction manuals (which you never read anyway) for making appliances last longer and avoiding costly repairs. If you love beer, wine or whiskey, your heart may thank you, as long as you know exactly how much is too much for your overall health. JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, tells what the right amount is -- and shares the research that proves it. All the best, Jessica Kent Editor BottomLineSecrets.com The Drugs No Senior Should Ever Take In 1991, a team from Harvard Medical School identified 20 drugs too dangerous for use by elderly patients. Then they found out that 23% of seniors are receiving these very drugs. And the Journal of the American Medical Association said this study was "merely the tip of the iceberg." They were right. Now the list has grown to several dozen drugs. Congress was so disturbed it asked its watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office, to look into it. Using Medicare data, the GAO found over 17 percent of the elderly receive unsafe drugs. Learn more... When Not to Clean Your Oven Vernon Schmidt How long your appliances last isn’t just a matter of how well they’re built. How you treat them matters, too. Here are some simple tricks to keep your major appliances running as long as possible and avoid expensive repairs... Dishwashers and clothes washers: Use less detergent. People tend to fill dishwasher soap cups to the brim and use the amount of clothes detergent recommended on the bottle or box. That’s way too much. Modern dishwashers and washing machines use less water than those of decades past, so less detergent is needed. Also, more powerful and concentrated detergents are available today. Using excessive amounts of detergent creates a soapy residue inside the machine that results in a buildup of mold and mildew, which smells and eats away at the rubber parts, shortening the appliance’s life. In a dishwasher, try using just one-half to one full teaspoon of liquid or powder detergent. If that doesn’t clean your dishes -- perhaps because you have hard water -- gradually increase the amount up to one tablespoon. If you have used too much detergent in the past, also use a dishwasher cleaner, available in most supermarkets, to remove soap residue. Leading brands include Glisten and Finish. Alternative: Use solid tablets that include premeasured amounts of detergent. If you have soft water, split the tablets in half. Don’t use liquid gel packs, because they contain too much detergent and are too sudsy. In a clothes washer, use just two tablespoons of regular detergent, or one tablespoon of concentrated detergent if you have soft water and your washer is a modern front-load or high-efficiency top-load machine. If you have hard water and/or your clothes washer is not a modern front-load or high-efficiency top-load machine, use one-quarter of the amount of detergent recommended on the detergent label. Only if you are washing extremely dirty clothes should you use the amount of detergent recommended on the label. Clothes dryers: Clean out your dryer’s exhaust line at least once each year. If the plastic or flexible-metal ductwork that your electric dryer uses to vent hot air is clogged with lint, the dryer’s heating element will overheat and might fail. Clogged lines can cause serious mechanical problems for gas dryers, too. And with either electric or gas, a clogged vent can double or triple the amount of energy required to dry a load of clothing. On a gas dryer, the lint that builds up also can cause carbon monoxide to vent into the home and possibly start a fire. If your dryer’s exhaust line is too long to clear out by hand, purchase a dryer-vent cleaning kit with a flexible extension rod long enough to reach the full length of your dryer’s exhaust line. These are available at home-improvement stores for less than $50. Remember to clean both the portion of the exhaust line that leads from the dryer to the wall and the part inside the wall. Refrigerators: If your older refrigerator’s rubber-door seal gaskets are becoming brittle, apply a layer of Vaseline to keep them supple. Reapply whenever the gasket feels dry to the touch. It’s probably time to replace the gasket if it has cracked or split. Replacing door gaskets on older machines with screw-on gaskets is a labor-intensive job that usually costs $200 to $300 per door. Also: On most refrigerators, you need to clean the coil -- the metal piping typically located behind a removable panel at the base of or behind the refrigerator -- at least once a year. Clean it at least twice a year if a dog or cat that sheds lives in the home. A refrigerator’s compressor is forced to work much harder when the coil is coated with dust or pet hair. That can cause overheating and compressor failure. Having a new compressor installed is likely to cost more than $400 in parts and labor. Your refrigerator’s manual should include directions for cleaning the coil. Even if the owner’s manual says that the coil is self-cleaning, it still needs to be cleaned at least once a year. I have never seen a clean "self-clean" coil on a refrigerator after two years of use. Ovens: There isn’t much you can do to extend the life of an oven, but there is something you can do to reduce the odds that it will fail at a particularly inconvenient moment. Best: Wait until after the November/December holidays to run the self-cleaning cycle. People tend to run oven self-cleaning cycles immediately before big cooking days, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and important dinner parties. Unfortunately, ovens are most likely to fail during or soon after these self-cleaning cycles because of the very high temperatures involved. It isn’t easy to get a broken oven fixed around the holidays, either -- appliance repair shops and parts distributors often are closed. Bottom Line/Personal interviewed Vernon Schmidt, who has more than 35 years of experience in appliance repair. Currently he is service operations manager for Clark Appliance in Indianapolis. He also answers appliance questions through his RefrigDoc.com Web site and is author of The Appliance Handbook for Women: Simple Enough Even Men Can Understand (AuthorHouse), available through Amazon.com and http://RefrigDoc.com. Blood Pressure 'Switch' Found on Human Body... Chicago, IL: A recent study conducted by the Hypertension Center at the University of Chicago identified a small spot (the "Atlas area") on the body that appears to control blood pressure. In minutes, a single touch lowers blood pressure back to healthy levels. Top number drops 14 points, bottom number drops 8 points. No drug on Earth can match this instant miracle. Who knew it was this simple? It’s almost like a switch that allows doctors to dial down your blood pressure in minutes. Learn more... The Right Way to Drink Wine JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH Harvard Medical School Should you raise a glass "to your health" -- and if so, is red wine best? What we know now... Pros vs. cons. Consuming moderate amounts of alcohol may lower a woman’s risk for heart disease by 20% to 40%, primarily by raising HDL "good" cholesterol, reducing clotting and decreasing inflammation. But: Drinking increases the risk for cancers of the breast, larynx and digestive tract and for hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke. What tips the scale: For women below age 50, who are more likely to get breast cancer than heart disease, alcohol carries a net risk. For women in their 50s and beyond, who are at higher risk for heart disease than for breast cancer, there may be a net benefit to drinking alcohol in moderation. Red wine and resveratrol. Some research suggests that red wine delivers greater health benefits than other alcoholic beverages -- possibly due to its high levels of antioxidants called polyphenols. In studies with mice, the polyphenol resveratrol extended life span and slowed signs of aging by turning on normally inactive longevity and vitality genes called sirtuins. However, you would need to consume 1,000 bottles of red wine per day to get a resveratrol dose equal to the amount tested in mice! What’s more, other studies suggest that health benefits derive from alcohol itself, not from red wine specifically. My opinion: If you do drink, choose whichever type of beverage you prefer. Heavy metal warning. A recent study found potentially toxic levels of heavy metals in some wines. Heavy metals have been linked to cancer and neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. Though more research is needed, it may be prudent to limit consumption of wines from Austria, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Wines from Argentina, Brazil and Italy were found to have safe levels of heavy metals. No US wines were studied. What moderation means. Due to metabolic differences, women generally can tolerate only half as much alcohol as men before becoming intoxicated. Moderate drinking for women means no more than one drink -- five ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer or 1.5 ounces of liquor -- per day. But: Even this amount can boost cancer risk, so I recommend a limit of one drink three to four times per week or half a drink per day. The case for abstinence. If you don’t drink, there’s no reason to start. There are safer ways -- exercising, watching your weight, eating healthfully, not smoking -- to protect your heart. Avoid alcohol if you have a personal or family history of alcoholism or a type of cancer linked to alcohol... have liver disease or ulcers... take a blood thinner, such as warfarin (Coumadin)... or are pregnant. Bottom Line/Women’s Health interviewed JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH, professor of medicine and women’s health at Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, both in Boston. She is one of the lead investigators for two highly influential studies on women’s health -- the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study and the Women’s Health Initiative. Dr. Manson is the author, with Shari Bassuk, ScD, of Hot Flashes, Hormones & Your Health (McGraw-Hill). Secret to Reversing Arthritis Pain Joseph couldn't walk a step without limping when Mark Stengler, ND, first saw him. For years, his osteoarthritis had been steadily getting worse. Now his painkillers were giving him ulcers, the agony was unbearable, and he envisioned a knee replacement in the near future. But Dr. Stengler did not give him steroids or even an aspirin tablet! Instead, he told Joe about a natural compound so harmless that even pregnant women can take it safely. Just two days later, his pain had already faded dramatically... Read on... Important: Help your friends get much more out of life -- forward this E-letter to them. Better: Send it to many friends and your whole family. This is a free weekly e-mail service of BottomLineSecrets.com and Boardroom Inc. Boardroom Inc. 281 Tresser Boulevard Stamford, CT 06901-3229 ATTN: Web Team You received this e-mail because you have requested it. You are on the mailing list as healthwellness82@gmail.com. Or... a friend forwarded it to you. Disclaimer: Bottom Line Secrets publishes the opinions of expert authorities in many fields. But the use of these opinions is no substitute for legal, accounting, investment, medical and other professional services to suit your specific personal needs. Always consult a competent professional for answers to your specific questions. Bottom Line Secrets is a registered trademark of Boardroom Inc. 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