Reducing your risk for developing coronary heart disease

In order to increase your chances of success in reducing your risk for developing coronary heart disease, follow these tips:

1. Consult your physician.

2. Monitor your eating and activity behaviors.

3. Familiarize yourself with foods that contain small or large amounts of cholesterol, fats and sodium.

4. Follow the suggested food-group units for a diet of 1600 or 2000 calories, or calculate your own individual energy needs. The less active you are, the fewer calories you can afford to eat without gaining weight.

5. Study the sample menus that follow to assist you in designing your own diet. What is important is that you generally eat as suggested, paying more attention to the types of food you eat and the way the foods are prepared than to exact amounts. Of course, this does not mean you should eat more than suggested if you are trying to lose weight or if you find you are gaining undesired weight. Use your common sense in these matters.

Divisions of biochemistry

No rigid, conventional divisions of biochemistry exist, as in the case of chemistry and physics proper, where a distinction between organic' and "inorganic," for example, is rather sharp. Still dominant is the treatment where the class of substance involved is the name of the subject, as "Carbohydrates," "Fats," "Proteins. . . . . Inorganic Constituents," "Accessory Substances," and now '"Hormones." Almost all texts describe these groups of substances and then take up what is known of their ingestion or synthesis in the body, their role, their metabolism and the further course, final consumption and elimination of the products of their metabolism. That at least the principal classes of materials serve as equivalents of one another and are mutually convertible tends to upset any such classification. The latter part of many a text, therefore, resorts to a series of chapters where the physiological process, e.g. digestion, or the function of an important organ, e.g., the kidney or the liver, serves as the division of the subject.

Occasionally a text starts with a phsico-chemical introduction in place of the organic chemistry of the principal materials. In such cases a stress on colloid chemistry is imperative. The fields of biochemistry shape up as applications of sectors of the other sciences to living systems.