Here's a word I had to look up today:

Cachexia. I got the definition from Medicine Net.com:

Physical wasting with loss of weight and muscle mass caused by disease. Patients with advanced cancer, AIDS, and some other major chronic progressive diseases may appear cachectic. Cachexia is a wasting syndrome that causes weakness and a loss of weight, fat, and muscle. Anorexia (lack of apppetite) and cachexia often occur together. Cachexia can occur in people who are eating enough, but who cannot absorb the nutrients. Cachexia is not the same as starvation. A healthy person's body can adjust to starvation by slowing down its use of nutrients, but in cachectic patients, the body does not make this adjustment.

Work that one into your conversations, eh? I ran across it while reading this article about CoQ10.

Cutting to the chase:

Several trials involved the comparison between supplemental CoQ10 and placebo on heart function as measured by echocardiography. CoQ10 was given orally in divided doses as a dry tablet chewed with a fat containing food or an oil based gel cap swallowed at mealtime. Heart function, as indicated by the fraction of blood pumped out of the heart with each beat (the ejection fraction), showed a gradual and sustained improvement in tempo with a gradual and sustained improvement in patients' symptoms of fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain, and palpitations. The degree of improvement was occasionally dramatic with some patients developing a normal heart size and function on CoQ10 alone. Most of these dramatic cases were patients who began CoQ10 shortly after the onset of congestive heart failure. Patients with more established disease frequently showed clear improvement but not a return to normal heart size and function.

Internationally, there have been at least nine placebo controlled studies on the treatment of heart disease with CoQ10:two in Japan,two in the United States, two in Italy, two in Germany, and one in Sweden (17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25). [I've no idea what those numbers refer to, ed.] All nine of these studies have confirmed the effectiveness of CoQ10 as well as its remarkable safety. ...The majority of the clinical studies concerned the treatment of heart disease and were remarkably consistent in their conclusions: that treatment with CoQ10 significantly improved heart muscle function while producing no adverse effects or drug interactions.

They end the article with a FAQ that is well worth reading. Here's a couple important points: "should a reasonably healthy person take CoQ10 to stay healthy or to become more robust? At present I do not believe anyone knows the answer to this question." And, "Published data on the dosage of CoQ10 relates almost exclusively to the treatment of disease states. There is no information on the use of CoQ10 for prevention of illness. This is an extremely important question which, to date, does not have an answer."

There's more. If you read the article, you'll go out and buy some. That's where I'm headed.