What’s the magic number? 35 inches for women — 40 inches for men, measured right at the belly button.

I can’t help but wonder what Tim Russert’s number was, especially when I read what his internist, Dr. Michael Newman, told the New York Times: “If there’s one number that’s a predictor of mortality, it’s waist circumference.” Russert was taking both blood pressure and cholesterol medication and exercising every day. But he was significantly overweight, he said.

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If you like to drink coffee, drink more. Lots more. It probably won’t hurt you and may even save your life, especially if you’re a woman.

Coffee has always been a pretty benign drug for most people. Now it turns out that it may actually reduce the risk of death from heart disease and other causes.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health studied the histories of 125,000 men and women who reported how much coffee they drank between 1980 and 2004. The more coffee they drank, the less likely they were to die from a heart attack or cardiovascular disease. That was especially true for women. Compared to those who didn’t drink coffee, those who drank 5 to 7 cups per week had 7 percent lower risk for death. The real coffee addicts who drink 4 to 5 cups per day had a 26 percent lower risk of death. The lower risk was mostly related to heart disease, but cancer deaths in women were lower, too, the researchers found.

It’s not the caffeine that does it because they found a similar pattern in the people who drank decaffeinated coffee.

So what’s going on? Antioxidants, they think. Like blue berries, green tea and chocolate, coffee contains antioxidants. Those are the chemicals that snag the free-floating molecules in our bodies called free radicals. Free radicals, created by the body’s natural metabolic processes like breathing and digesting food, are culprits in aging and disease. In particular, they are related to the inflammatory process that causes plaque to build up in our arteries, causing cardiovascular disease.

The authors of the research study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, say it doesn’t prove coffee is the fountain of youth. It could be something else about coffee drinkers that contributes to their longer lives.

But never mind that. If you’re reading this with a cup of coffee at your side, just think about how how all those antioxidants are running around your bloodstream picking off those nasty free radicals to keep your arteries wide open. And enjoy.

Behind the headlines this week about how two of the biggest selling drugs in the world have bombed is an interesting tale of how and why drugs are developed, tested, and sold.

Zetia and Vytorin, a combination of the old statin Zocor and Zetia, came on the market like blockbusters,  even though they had not been extensively studied. The Food and Drug Administration does not require a lot of those kinds of studies because the link between low density cholesterol and heart disease is medical gospel.  Zetia had been studied in only a few thousand patients before it was approved, but doctors and patients loved it because it could bring cholesterol down without the same unpleasant side affects (muscle pain, bloating, gastrointestinal problems) that come with other cholesterol lowering drugs, especially when given in high doses.  

The study, a hot topic at the American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago this week, found that Zetia lowered cholesterol all right. But it did nothing to reduce the amount of fatty plaque that causes heart attacks and strokes. In fact, it made it worse. 

But that’s not what made the doctors mad.  The cardiology conference was in an uproar because the doctors believed the drug companies that make the Zetia and Vytorin (Merck and Schering-Plough) sat on that information for more than a year. (The companies dispute that.) Meanwhile, they continued to market and sell the drug to millions of people, generating sales of $5 billion last year.

The good news is that the drugs apparently do no harm to the people who take them. For reasons that no one understands at this point they just don’t seem to do any good.

Now the big questions remain: Is medical gospel wrong? Is there a limit to how much lowering cholesterol can help? Does Zetia prevent heart attacks and stroke? We won’t know the answers to those an other questions until the long-term outcomes study on Zetia is completed in 2012 or so.

Should you stop taking Zetia or Vytorin if you take them now?  Well, say doctors, that depends. Experts at the conference said they should only be taken as a last resort if nothing else works.

So once again, it’s up to you and your doctor to figure it out.

And stay tuned. The cardiology conference is just beginning.