It’s the help your heart needs when your heart needs help the most: A new study finds that the curry spice turmeric can help you survive bypass surgery and avoid a heart attack during your recovery.

Researchers from Thailand randomly assigned 121 bypass patients to either a gram of curcumin — the main compound in turmeric — taken four times a day, or a placebo for three days before and five days after the procedure.

Those who got the curcumin were 65 percent less likely to have a heart attack in that time than those who got the placebo, even after adjusting for other possible risk factors.

Those who got the real deal also had lower levels of the inflammation marker C-reactive protein as well as malondialdehyde, a marker of oxidative stress — and I’m sure that’s because curcumin is both a powerful anti-inflammatory and a terrific antioxidant.

And you don’t have to be a heart patient to enjoy those benefits.

Get some now, and you can lower your risk of even getting those cardiovascular problems in the first place, since studies on mice have shown that curcumin can help clear fatty deposits from the arteries.

Other studies have shown it may help prevent arrhythmias, while still other research has found that curcumin can fight everything from inflammatory bowel disease to cancer to arthritis.

One study I just told you about found it might even help reverse the damage of Parkinson’s disease.

Indian foods might be the most delicious way to get curcumin, but it’s not the most efficient — especially here in the United States, where most people simply don’t eat it all that often.

Fortunately, curcumin supplements are inexpensive and easy to find — just make sure yours comes from a company you trust and not the local dollar store.

You don’t need to be in alternative medicine to know that statin drugs are a bad idea.

These days, even the doctors who once gave them out to nearly everyone are waking up to the fact that cholesterol drugs do plenty of harm and very little good.

And now, “mainstream” doctors are turning to what was once dismissed as “alternative” medicine to bring cholesterol levels down — including the simple lifestyle changes that I’ve been advocating from the beginning.

It’s not exactly a radical idea, but I’m glad to see the rest of the country catching on — and some are even bragging about their results in places such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One recent series of editorials there was a debate between two competing mainstream teams trying to treat a hypothetical 55-year-old patient with high cholesterol levels who was otherwise healthy.

A decade ago, I’m sure they all would have said “statins.”

Today, a set of doctors who said they’d use that approach were practically booed right out of the journal — with one team of doctors correctly pointing out that they’d have to treat 100 patients like that hypothetical man for five years to prevent even a single heart attack.

And if that’s all that happened — a heart attack was prevented — maybe it would be worthwhile.

But, as Dr. Rita Redberg and Dr. William Katz of the University of San Francisco, California wrote in the journal, at least one of those 100 patients will end up with diabetes because of those meds and a whopping 20 percent will experience the notorious statin side effects (and other studies like the Jupiter trial have shown risk closer to 25 percent).

Those include serious and debilitating muscle pain, fatigue, memory problems, cataracts, and even sexual dysfunction.

Now, I don’t know if this means these mainstream docs have gone alternative or if I’m suddenly mainstream. To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me — all that matters is that patients are finally getting the common-sense approach to cholesterol control they should have been given all along.

Better late than never.

For the most advanced cardiovascular testing contact the Stengler Center for Integrative Medicine at 760-274-2377.

Judging by myself and my patients — not to mention the bags under the eyes of many of the people I meet each day — I’d say the biggest problem when it comes to sleep is that we don’t get nearly enough of it.

But believe it or not, it’s possible to go too far in the other direction as well. Like all good things, you can get way too much sleep — and too much sleep can be every bit as dangerous as too little.

One new study spells out the risks I’ve seen before: More than eight hours of sleep a night will boost your risk of chest pain and coronary artery disease.

Of course, the study also confirms that those of us who don’t get enough should hit the hay a little earlier — because less than six hours a night can double your risk of heart attack or stroke.

Too little sleep can also boost the odds of congestive heart failure by 70 percent, according to the study of more than 3,000 people ages 45 and up presented at a recent American College of Cardiology conference.

That means the sweet spot for sleep — for most people anyway — is between six and eight hours a night, or right around the seven nightly hours I’ve seen recommended from other studies.

One of those studies found that less than six and more than eight hours can boost the risk of cognitive problems. Too little sleep leads to problems in reasoning, vocabulary, and global cognition, while too much sleep can actually hurt up to six cognitive functions, according to British researchers.

Another study in 2010 looked at even more extreme levels of sleep, and found even more extreme results. Less than five hours a night doubles the risk of angina, heart disease, heart attack, or stroke — while nine or more boosts the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, and stroke.

What does this mean for you? Get the right amount of sleep, of course.

Just don’t turn to meds for help. Common sleep drugs can increase the risk of a number of health problems, up to and including death itself.

Any time I use the words “soda” and “study” in the same sentence, it’s never good news for soda. I can’t recall a single study that shows soda benefits anything other than the bank accounts of the people who sell it.

And the latest research is no exception.

A new look at data on 42,883 men between the ages of 40 and 75 finds that those who drank the most sugary drinks had a 20 percent higher risk of a heart attack during the 22-year study — a link that held even after adjusting for risk factors such as smoking, activity levels and a family history of heart problems.

What’s more, the researchers found that for each serving of a sugary drink you down in a day — like one 12-ounce cola — your risk of cardiovascular disease is boosted by 19 percent.

In addition, the men who drank the most sugary drinks also had lower levels of HDL cholesterol — that’s the good stuff — and higher levels of deadly triglycerides.

Think that’s bad? Hold on — because the study in Circulation gets even worse: Men who drank the most soda had the highest levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP. That’s an inflammation marker that can mean anything from heart disease to cancer to an autoimmune disorder.

But none of this should be surprising, since all of these problems have been linked to sugar before — and drinks are one of the biggest sources of sugar in the modern diet.

A single can of soda, for example, has roughly 40 grams of the sweet stuff. That’s like going to Starbucks and ordering a “tall” (or what the rest of us call a “small”) 12-ounce coffee… and putting 10 sugars into it.

It’s an insane amount of sugar.

For some incredible visuals on just how much of it is in each can, bottle, and Big Gulp, check out the images on the “Sugar Stacks” website.

All that sweet stuff is bound to play havoc with your body. Along with all the risks I mentioned earlier, even a moderate soda habit can cause your blood sugar levels to spike — eventually leading to metabolic syndrome and even diabetes.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ll be any safer switching to diet either. Other studies have found that diet soda drinkers actually gain weight — and at least one study linked diet soft drinks to an increased heart risk of its own, along with an increased risk of stroke.

I’m not done with soda yet — keep reading for more.