Lyle Hurd: It’s a pleasure to welcome Robert Kowalski back; he is the author of “The New 8-Week Cholesterol Cure” now out in paperback. Tell me a little bit about the whole situation with the family. I understand that your father died of a heart attack. You have had a number of heart problems that you have surmounted and your son Ross at an early age began to evidence the fact that he might have some propensity towards those problems. Can you explain how that works in the family and what you do to work as a family?
Robert Kowalski: Well it’s an interesting thing. People assume that heart disease is something that comes on somehow or another in middle age or older. The fact of the matter is that we know today that heart disease begins in childhood. One of the risk factors can be checked before a child is even born. We can literally take what is called the placental blood out of the chord and draw the blood and you will see whether a child’s cholesterol level is elevated or not. That is certainly not recommended for everyone but the thing is, if there is a family history as there has been as you said in my family. Early on I tested my kids they were 7 and 4, respectively my son Ross at age 7 and my daughter Jenny at 4 to test for their cholesterol levels to find out and many pediatricians today are doing that especially in cases like mine where there is a strong family history and by golly, if those cholesterol levels are up it’s especially important to start emphasizing a heart healthy lifestyle not that everyone shouldn’t do this but it is particularly important with those with a family history and by that I mean look, play with your kids, go out and actively play with your kids.
You are not going out and exercising but you are benefiting yourself by being physically active with the child throwing his Frisbee, playing catch with a ball, whatever it happens to be, take the dog on a run with you, throw the stick you know all those kinds of things um to play with the kids. What I did with my children when they were little, they are grown now, is we would go grocery shopping together and I’d let them make some selections and as they got a little older and started to learn how to read I taught them how to read a nutrition label and to see how much fat was in various things and long story, but I wrote a book on children’s health at one point and brought the kids along with me when I was doing a media tour and my son Ross at that time would have been ten years old and here he was on a major television show and he just looked into a camera after someone had asked him a question and said “you know in our household, fat is the F word” I thought that was great, but the point is that it literally can become part of a normal lifestyle for kids and for us as well, to just have this as a routine part of life and now I can tell you happily that neither child has any problem with weight, they are both very physically active, they have never smoked a cigarette and they are well on their way to doing what I said is possible in the subtitle of that book I wrote on children and cholesterol and that is “how to give your children a future free of heart disease”
My motivation in the very beginning was to stay alive long enough to raise them into adulthood or even early adulthood. I would have made a deal back then just to get them into college so they’d be sort of on their own. Now I have gotten greedy, now that the doctors have told me that my heart health is very good and I want to do something Lyle that my dad was never able to do because he died of his heart attack, his one and only heart attack at age 57. Long before I had children, met my wife so he never had the opportunity to meet his grandchildren and now my motivation in life is I want to stick around to do what my dad never did, to bounce those babies on my knee to take them out to their first ballgame to introduce them to the birds that I love so much. To enjoy my grandchildren and by golly I am going to keep working at staying healthy for them and for me.
Lyle Hurd: Good for you, thanks again.
Robert Kowalski: My pleasure Lyle.
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