Don’t Skip A Beat: Prepare for Heart Attacks

Healthy heart

Preparing for a potential heart attack now could save a life later.

A crisis often strikes without warning, whether it’s a tornado, an earthquake, or a heart attack. Although heart attacks can happen suddenly, you can take steps now to prepare in case one should ever happen to you or a loved one. February is American Heart Month, a perfect time to ask yourself, “Would I know what to do in the event of a heart attack?”Following a heart attack, approximately 1 in 4 women will die within the first year, compared to 1 in 5 men.

Approximately every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. A heart attack happens when a part of the heart doesn’t get enough blood, starving it of the oxygen it needs. This reduced or blocked blood flow is usually caused by the buildup of a waxy substance called plaque in the arteries—a process that can take years to develop.

No matter how healthy you and your loved ones may be, you can take steps to prepare for the possibility of a heart attack. Preparation could help save a life.

  1. Know the risks. Be educated about the risks you and your loved ones face. Certain behaviors and conditions can increase your risk for a heart attack, including smoking, having uncontrolled high blood pressure, being overweight, and eating an unhealthy diet. Talk to your health care professional about what you can do to lower or manage these risks.
  2. Have a heart-to-heart. Engage friends, family members, and loved ones in a conversation about heart attack risks, and discuss what you can do together to prevent a heart attack. You might learn that you can help someone live a healthier life by taking them grocery shopping, driving them to medical visits, or reminding them to take their medicines. This is also an excellent time to document your own family health history. Knowing your family’s health history can tell you a lot about your own risk for heart attack because heart attack risk can often be inherited.
  3. Recognize the signs. Heart attacks look and feel different in women than they do in men. Both men and women may feel chest pain when having a heart attack, but women are more likely to also experience shortness of breath, nausea or vomiting, and pain in the back, neck, or jaw. About 1 in 5 heart attacks are called “silent” heart attacks, which means you’re having a heart attack but don’t know it.Signs and symptoms of heart attack in men and women
  4. Be safe, not sorry. Many heart attacks start slowly with relatively mild pain. That keeps many people from calling 911 as soon as they should. Make an agreement with loved ones that you will call 911 as soon as anyone experiences any of the signs of a heart attack. Don’t hesitate: acting fast can save a life.
  5. Write down important information. Keep a record of what medicines your loved ones are taking, what medicines they’re allergic to, and who they would want to have contacted in case of an emergency. If your loved one is hospitalized for a heart attack, you’ll have important information at your fingertips.
  6. Focus on prevention. It pays to be prepared in case a heart attack happens, but the best case scenario is to never experience a heart attack at all. You can help prevent heart attack from happening by eating healthfully, getting enough physical activity, not smoking, staying at a healthy weight, and managing other health conditions like high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, and diabetes. Reach out to your loved ones and commit to making these healthy changes together.

Staying heart-healthy is a lifestyle. Support from friends and loved ones can help empower you to be your healthiest self. This American Heart Month, show your support and share tips about how you encourage your loved ones to be heart-healthy by using the hashtag #HeartToHeart on Twitter and Facebook. You can find other ways to participate in American Heart Month by visiting the Million Hearts website.

Preparedness Love for Valentine’s Day

conversation hearts

Whether it’s your sweetheart, your children, or your favorite furry friend, Valentine’s Day is a great time to show that someone special that you care! This Valentine’s Day, remind your loved ones to be ready for emergencies. Nothing says I love you quite like “I have made you my emergency contact person.”  Even Sheldon Cooper agrees that emergency contact information is quite the romantic notion.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Public Health Association have humorous, love-themed preparedness e-Cards you can share. It’s Valentine’s Day, so the cheesier the better, right?

If you’re struggling with what to give your Valentine, check out this video from the Office of Emergency Management in Fairfax County, Virginia. They offer Sweet Emergency Preparedness Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas.

While an emergency kit may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you’re thinking flowers and boxes of chocolates, it could end up being the most important gift you give your loved ones this year.  Most of us would love to be a little more prepared but don’t know where to start. Gift loved ones with a starter emergency kit for the home or the road, and don’t forget to include your kids and pets in your emergency planning!

The Starter Kit

To get started, pack a few items in a small plastic storage container or water-proof bags that can be stored easily. You can include:

  • First aid kit (You can get a pre-made kit at most of your local drug stores or pharmacies)
  • Flashlight and extra batteries
  • Portable phone charger (also sometimes known as a portable battery. This charger should be rechargeable and have the ability to charge a phone without being plugged into a power source)
  • Manual can openers (and a reminder that every emergency kit should include a three-day supply of food and water)

Most of us spend a lot of time in our cars. Consider putting together a kit of emergency supplies that your loved one can keep in their car. Plan your gift based on local hazards. If you live in an area that gets significant amounts of snow, you may consider including a windshield scraper, extra hats, coats, mittens, and blankets. For any emergency, your car kit include these basic items:

  • Basic tool kit with pliers, a wrench, and screwdriver
  • Jumper cables (you may consider purchasing a “roadside emergency kit” from your local auto shop that also includes reflective triangle markers, gloves, and a flashlight)
  • First aid kit
  • Cellphone charger (either a car charger or rechargeable portable charger)

Emergency Prep for Kids

Girl cutting out paper heart, selective focusYour kids are probably going to surprise you with a sweet Valentine’s card or even a decorated shoebox, so return the favor! Get kids excited and interested in emergency preparedness with CDC’s Ready Wrigley activity books. You can print coloring books for disasters including, extreme heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and winter weather.  Help kids check-off items on Ready Wrigley’s emergency kit list with some of the following items:

  • Flashlight and extra batteries
  • A battery-powered or crank weather radio
  • Small and portable games or activities that can entertain kids if they have to shelter in place or evacuate to a shelter. (Small board games, playing cards, books, or stuffed animals are good items to consider)..

Pets and Pet Lovers

Dog with Valentines day lookYour pets provide unconditional love year-round, so don’t leave them out of your emergency plans! Even though they may never know what you’ve done for them, you can pull together a few items for your pet in case of an emergency. Think about how to transport your pet safely – a crate or harness, perhaps – and also think about their comfort in a scary situation by keeping a few toys and a pet bed in case you are forced to evacuate.

All of these emergency packages are great gifts to help friends, family, or yourself start an emergency kit. Check out CDC’s Emergency Preparedness and You page for more tips on how to be prepared for any emergency.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Valentine’s Day Couples in the Animal Kingdom

While humans may be the only ones with a day dedicated to celebrating romantic love, rest assured that the semblance of ‘love’ is alive and well in the animal kingdom too. While ‘love’ in this context may not hold the … Continue reading »

The post Valentine’s Day Couples in the Animal Kingdom appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.

Eskimo Kisses

Happy Valentine’s Day (one day in advance)!

"Free Eskimo Kisses" by Legohaulic (All Rights Reserved; Used With Permission)

“Free Eskimo Kisses” by Legohaulic (All Rights Reserved; Used With Permission)


Filed under: Items of Interest Tagged: Lego, Legohaulic, Narwhal, valentine's day

Cooking for Valentine’s Day

Earlier this week, our own Ben Witten helped you make the perfect dessert for Valentine’s Day. Today, we bring you good friend of The Finch & Pea, Joel Gamoran, on his cooking web series, Kitchen Wasteland, teaching you how to make Scallops & Grapefruit for dinner and Chocolate Truffles for, well, any time*. The beauty is that his recipes can be executed even in a tiny NY or San Francisco apartment with just a hot plate.


*It is Valentine’s Day. You are allowed to have both chocolate truffles and crème brûlée. Better than “allowed” – you are strongly encouraged.


Filed under: From the Kitchen Tagged: Joel Gamoran, Kitchen Wasteland, valentine's day

Creme Brulee: The Science of Sexy [Repost]

Editor’s Note: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we are reposting a slightly updated version of Ben’s crème brûlée recipe that was originally posted 31 August 2012. Not only is it delicious, but we have found the eggucation contained within will make all your attempts to cook an egg more successful. The recipe is the same, but we have updated the recipe PDF.

I have promised you sexy food, and the science behind it. Therefore, crème brûlée. Look at all those accent marks! Sexy, right? And, why not start with eggs – queen of ingredients, bringers of life, denizens of diner griddles, the heart of fluffy meringues, and the soul of silky custards. Crème brûlée is sexy because it is simple. Smooth, creamy custard1 contrasts with a thin, crisp layer of smoky caramel. Every flavor and texture is a balance – creamy and crisp, sweet and bitter, light and deep – harmonizing to enhance and elevate the dish.

Click image for printable PDF (74kb)

Click image for printable PDF (74kb)

If you want to know the steps to making crème brûlée, use the recipe above (PDF – 74kb). If you want to know how crème brûlée becomes sexy keep reading. The science of sexy can be unlocked by understanding the properties of its simple ingredients.THE EGG

Crème brûlée is made with egg yolks, and only the egg yolk. Egg yolk has a lower protein concentration and more fats than egg whites. These factors cause the proteins in the yolk to clump more slowly in the yolk than the whites.

Proteins normally exist in neatly ordered structures, ready to do their biological jobs. The heat from the pan causes these proteins to unravel. Unlike the uncooked, organized proteins we started with, the unraveled proteins can become tangled up with each other and form clumps, like strands of Christmas lights. We call this clumping process coagulation.

Proteins clump faster and at lower temperatures in the whites than the yolk, because the whites have a higher protein concentration and lower concentrations of other, interfering molecules, like delicious fats. The short-order cook at your local diner exploits this difference in coagulation rates to give you the fully cooked whites and runny yolk of a perfect fried egg.

The same thing happens in a custard. Egg whites in a custard mean more protein clumping; and more protein clumping means a firmer and less creamy custard. We want silky, creamy, and sexy. So, we only use the egg yolk.

THE MIX
Egg whites normally begin to coagulate at 140F (60C). Yolks begin to coagulate at 150F (66C). Adding milk and sugar slows coagulation raising the coagulation temperature to 150F (66C) for whites and 160F (71C) for yolks. Using cream instead of milk adds more fats, further disrupts protein clumping, and raises the coagulation temperature, giving us a softer custard as shown on the graph below (if science fair taught me one thing, it was graphs are important).

Since we are looking for the creamiest combo we can get, we are going to use yolks and cream. To further ensure that perfect cook for our yolks, we are going let the cream help our egg yolks handle the heat through a process we call tempering. When working with eggs it is always important to heat them slowly. I don’t care if you are making custard, scrambled eggs, or over-easy. ALWAYS HEAT THEM SLOWLY! Rapid heat transfer unravels proteins faster and creates more firm bonds between them. Firm bonds equal rubbery eggs. No one has ever sent back their eggs because the weren’t rubbery enough.

If you heat two eggs to the same temperature, but heat one rapidly and the other slowly, the egg heated rapidly will always have tighter bonds and be less delicate. This is why every custard recipe has that enigmatic direction to slowly pour heated cream into the eggs. Because we are adding only a little heated cream to a lot of egg yolks and mixing2 (tempering), each bit of cream only slightly increases the temperature of our mixture. If our eggs are gently warmed before encountering the more intense heat of the oven, the initial change in temperature for the eggs is less dramatic and the protein clumping is less severe. If we were to put a completely cooled custard mixture in the oven, the initial heat transfer would be more rapid to bring it up to temperature giving you a less delicate custard. But, that isn’t our only trick for handling the heat.

THE BATH
Our mixture of cream, yolks, and sugar now has a starting coagulation point of about 170F (77C). As a result, our custard will reach a state of uniform, silky bonding around 180F (82C) and start to scramble (chef jargon for coagulating the crap out of some proteins) at 190 – 200F (88-93C). A clever and eager reader who has been reading the recipe, might say, “Hold up! The recipe says to bake the custards at 325F (163C). That’s a bit hotter than the scrambling temperature of 200F (93C). Saboteur!” Not so fast. Your oven is set to 325F (163C), but I promise I’ll keep them cooler than that. That’s why we are going to take them swimming.

We are going to put our custard in a water bath, or bain marie. If we slid our custards into a 325F (163C) oven as is, the outside would scramble before the heat had time to reach the center leaving the inside runny and raw. The water bath is there to moderate the heat. Water is a liquid between 32F and 212F(0-100C)3. At 212F (100C)3, the water turns into vapor. Liquid water cannot get any hotter than 212F (100C)3. Any extra heat energy is used to change from liquid to vapor or to heat up the vapor. By surrounding our custard with water that cannot exceed 212F (100C), we are now actually cooking them closer to their coagulation point and can gently bring the entire mixture to an even coagulation. I also like to seal the top of my pan with foil. This traps a cushion of steam in the pan to moderate the heat hitting the top of the custard.

We now have the creamy side of our sexy equation. All that’s left is a little contrast…a little crunch.

THE BURN
It is the caramel layer that puts the brûlée in the crème brûlée. Which means you get to burn something. On purpose. With a torch. Caramel is simply burnt sugar.  Sugar starts burning at 320F (160C). For caramel, we normally do a slow burn, typically in a pan, to control the darkness, and, therefore, the bitterness, of the caramel. For the crème brûlée we need a fast burn, because the sugar is sitting on top of the custard4. If we give the heat enough time to get into our custard, it will ruin all our careful work from before. Once again, we are trying to control our heat; and this is why I advocate using a torch instead of the broiler. A torch applies more heat more directly. You burn the sugar faster and with more control, but you won’t heat the rest of the dish. The extreme heat of the torch will melt and start burning the thin layer of sugar in seconds. With our thin crispy brûlée layer in place, our sexy equation is complete.

I am going  to take one last moment here to talk about what is not on the ingredients list. Crème brûlée should not be made with chunks of fruit fillings. Ever. This may sound like personal opinion, but I’m right. Chunks of fruit ruin the texture balance and become watery when cooked for long periods. Lovely pieces of fruit turn into unappetizing pockets of steaming mush that over cook the surrounding custard. Save the fruit for an accompaniment.

And, don’t even think about making chocolate crème brûlée. You heard me:

Put! Down! The! Chocolate! NOW!

The amount of starch in cocoa powder makes chocolate a thickening agent. Add it and heat to a liquid (eg, custard) and your mixture will thicken giving you something thick and dense like pudding5 instead of a soft, silky custard. Tasty, but not the elegantly sexy crème brûlée we’re making here.

Hopefully you will walk away from this post with the confidence and knowledge to cook your own sexy custard creations.  Remember, with the right understanding of your ingredients, you are only a pan, some tap water, and a torch away from silky, creamy decadence.

CHEF’S NOTES

  1. The technical term for any heated mixture of milk, sugar, and egg.
  2. If you don’t mix as you pour, you will get hot spots around the cream that will scramble the surrounding yolk.
  3. At sea level in an unpressurized system
  4. Do not try pouring melted caramel over the top. Caramel is viscous and you will end up with a thick layer of hardened caramel instead of the thin crisp layer you get from torching the sugar directly on the custard.
  5. Or pots du crème.

Filed under: From the Kitchen Tagged: Crème brûlée, eggs, sexy, valentine's day