Every Woman’s Guide to a Heart-Healthy Life
By Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum
Avery

Find balance. Reduce stress. Check in with yourself.

These platitudes make for the springboard into Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum’s Heart Book.

The cardiologist draws from her years of practice to offer a holistic approach to healing the heart. She leads a grand tour of the heart’s physical and emotional landscape, from the importance of the endothelium (the heart’s lining) to the surprising effects of a broken heart. With detours along the way to address why women often ignore their hearts and overlook symptoms of serious heart disease, Steinbaum offers a guide that is both practical and empowering.

Steinbaum covers traditional and unexpected risk factors for heart disease and provides intelligent synopses of how stress, diet, and exercise (or lack of) are linked to everything from heart palpitations to mitral valve prolapse. Dense, technical descriptions are punctuated with humor and amusing anecdotes, like an incident where Steinbaum felt compelled to give a mother on the street an unsolicited lecture for feeding her baby potato chips.

At times, she veers toward the dramatic, and she does quite a bit of finger-wagging at drinkers and smokers—“Every inhalation is like a round of Russian roulette”—and her “prescriptions” for a healthy lifestyle are slightly pedantic. Yet her straight shooting about how and why lifestyle choices catch up with us is refreshing, and Steinbaum writes with the authority, passion, and warmth of someone who knows all too well why women internalize stress, compromise themselves for others, and jeopardize their hearts. Her book will resonate with many women seeking to “have it all,” and it’s obvious that Steinbaum’s insights come from the heart.