National Wear Red Day may only come once a year, but Star Jones, a TV personality, attorney, and national volunteer for the American Heart Association, said she works all year round to educate women on their risks for heart disease.
"A lot of people still think of [heart disease] as an old white dude disease," Jones said, but it's the "number one killer of all women, number one killer of black people, number one killer of all Americans," she said. "I'm three for three and I want people to understand what their risks are."
In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists heart disease as the "leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States."
Ten years ago, Jones had open heart surgery, the "full-blown open heart surgery where they take your heart out of your body and do surgery on it," she notes. Initially, she had attributed symptoms like fatigue, intense heart palpitations, and lightheadedness when standing to being overweight. Now she knows these are warnings for heart disease for women.
She said her previous lifestyle "should have screamed heart disease," but she did not recognize the symptoms. Particularly now, she said, when demographic groups like millennials operate on "lack of sleep and addition of stress," they are adding to their cardiovascular risk. Jones said people need to know their personal health numbers like blood sugar and BMI, stop smoking, eat less, and move more.
Grace Harry, a former entertainment executive and author of "The Joy Strategist," joined Cheddar News to discuss her goal of helping people redefine the meaning of joy and happiness.
The chief suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway has admitted he beat the young Alabama woman to death on a beach in Aruba after she refused his advances. New details in the killing emerged Wednesday as Joran Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to extorting Holloway's mother, resolving a case that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly 20 years.
The trial of a Fugees rapper, who was convicted this year in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies, stretched across the worlds of politics and entertainment — and now the case is touching on the tech world with arguments that his defense attorney bungled the case, in part, by using an artificial intelligence program to write his closing arguments.
Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the first crack in a 10-day siege on the territory. Palestinians reeled from a massive blast at a Gaza City hospital that killed hundreds the day before and grew increasingly desperate as food and water supplies ran out.
