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The major league clubhouse is a sanctuary, a player’s retreat from the gawking eyes of the thousands of fans in attendance and the millions more on social media who examine his every step daily.

Over the last year, though, some players have become particularly careful even when they are in that 25-man hideaway.

Before a recent game at Citi Field, one player stood at his locker, peeked from left to right and then slipped a can of smokeless tobacco into his back pocket. There was a reason for his surreptitiousness. Since last April, a city law has banned such products for use at both the Mets’ home ballpark and at Yankee Stadium.

And yet the player may not have had to act that secretively. Although similar laws against use of smokeless tobacco now extend to 12 major league stadiums outside New York, there is no evidence that municipalities are trying to closely monitor tobacco use inside clubhouses or that they are attempting to fine players for violating any of the recent legislation.

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Each additional daily serving of fruits and vegetables that smokers and former smokers eat is associated with a 4 to 8 percent lower risk of their developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the third leading cause of death in the United States, a new study found.

The study, in Thorax, looked at more than 44,000 Swedish men, ages 45 to 79, who completed detailed health and dietary questionnaires. Nearly two-thirds had smoked at some point, and roughly one in four were current smokers.

Over the 13-year course of the study, 1,918 new cases of C.O.P.D. were identified. Men who ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day were 35 percent less likely to develop lung disease than those who ate two servings or less. There was no benefit for nonsmokers.

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10 JANUARY 2017 | GENEVA - Policies to control tobacco use, including tobacco tax and price increases, can generate significant government revenues for health and development work, according to a new landmark global report from WHO and the National Cancer Institute of the United States of America. Such measures can also greatly reduce tobacco use and protect people’s health from the world’s leading killers, such as cancers and heart disease. But left unchecked, the tobacco industry and the deadly impact of its products cost the world’s economies more than US$ 1 trillion annually in healthcare expenditures and lost productivity, according to findings published in The economics of tobacco and tobacco control. Currently, around 6 million people die annually as a result of tobacco use, with most living in developing countries. Read more......

Narrowed, aging blood vessels, which put most older American adults at risk for heart disease and strokes, are not inevitable. This fact was underscored by a newly published study of a population in the Bolivian Amazon.

Among these indigenous South Americans, known as the Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay), coronary atherosclerosis was found to be one-fifth as common than in the United States. CT scans of the hearts of 705 Tsimane adults aged 40 to 94 revealed that nearly nine in 10 had clean coronary arteries and faced no risk of heart disease. The research team estimated that an 80-year-old in the Tsimane group has the same vascular age as an American in his mid-50s.

I’ll return to the likely reasons and the lifesaving lessons we can all learn from them even now after a discussion of a half-century of improvements in the heart health of Americans.

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