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Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

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Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#141

Post by stavros »

lateforwork wrote: post #5

The title of the article says "don't die of heart disease", but given that we all have to die at some point, if you could choose what natural cause to die of, wouldn't you pick heart disease? It is the best way to die. The worst is stroke. So once you cross a certain age, say 60, don't worry about heart disease, worry instead about stroke.

You assume that you'll die at X years old, and get to pick the disease. In reality, you might die of heart disease at 60, or cancer at 70, or alzheimer's at 80. Which one do you pick?

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#142

Post by ekianjo »

zamiang_brennan wrote: post #54

Great post but quite surprised there is no mention of cutting red meat. There is a lot of evidence that especially the American diet is dangerously high in red meat to the point of elevating Heart Disease risk.

Especially the red meat pumped up with hormones...

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#143

Post by nerdponx »

collingreen wrote: post #96
Buttons840 wrote: post #58

I am not a statin skeptic--or rather, I don't want to be a statin skeptic. I've done the research and it makes sense to me, but I still feel some social and psychological pressures to reject statins. When I see that it is widely accepted that ApoB is better to measure than LDL-C, but the industry continues to measure LDL-C, but not ApoB, I wonder why. It makes me skeptical. When I see that the purpose of statins is t…

I ALSO want to not be a statin-skeptic but, like you, these things look very weird to me. The most prescribed drugs in the country and we don't even try to check if they are addressing the actual problem?

There is a financial incentive not to look.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#144

Post by tonymet »

pstuart wrote: post #18
tonymet wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking and eating sensibly is free. Even a balance oatmeal, rice & beans with infrequent meat servings would defend against heart disease better than expensive medicine, at less than $1 / day.

And not smoking or drinking saves you money!

nicotine is likely one of the best appetite-control , cognative-enhancing and anti-anxiety medications ever known to man. A large driver of obesity , anxiety and psychotropic abuse was smoking cessation.

Giving out nicotine gum , would decimate the drugs industry, but likely resolve a lot of our chronic health and depression issues.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#145

Post by kakacik »

puttycat wrote: post #117

I cannot judge the science in most of the article since I'm not a medical doctor. But since I have a PhD in computer science in a relevant subdomain, I can certainly judge the part where he recommends the following: > What should you do with your test results? Throw them into ChatGPT, of course! Do not count on anything coming out of ChatGPT for medical advice. Period.

Yeah its a self-made-help article, if you don't know any better this is what you do. It doesn't make it the best choice overall though.

It feels like the guy had a... mediocre GP, got scared by skin cancer diagnosis and over-corrected to most expensive path possible and since stuff was found out we have this article, roughly correct but written in a sensationalist (or freaked out) style. Some claims are outright false (like GPs not knowing heart disease is the biggest killer... really).

Wife is a doctor with overreach between public and private healthcare, and those private services also have their own motivations which aren't often straightforward help-as-much-as-possible, rather milk-as-much-as-possible with tests, scans, long term treatments and so on. Especially CT scans pour non-trivial amount of radiation on the body that on itself can cause cancer down the line.

With public healthcare you at least know primary motivation isn't cash flow but helping patients, the issue is rather overwhelmed resources with limited time per patient. It always depends on individual, as with engineering there are better and worse, yet we all somehow expect every single doctor to be 100% stellar infallible expert with 150 years of experience across all branches of medicine (absolutely impossible for any human being). Look around at your work if you are an engineer and perceive the spread of quality/seniority of each colleague. Same happens in medicine, just stakes are (much) higher.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#146

Post by kryogen1c »

mac-mc wrote: post #82
Buttons840 wrote: post #58

I am not a statin skeptic--or rather, I don't want to be a statin skeptic. I've done the research and it makes sense to me, but I still feel some social and psychological pressures to reject statins. When I see that it is widely accepted that ApoB is better to measure than LDL-C, but the industry continues to measure LDL-C, but not ApoB, I wonder why. It makes me skeptical. When I see that the purpose of statins is t…

If you fix it without statins through better lifestyle and diet, that is the preferrable route. As to why medicine is like this, it's because it's conservative, usually about 17 years behind university research[0], and doctors are shackled to guidelines in most health systems or risk losing their licenses. It isn't a coincidence that the article author had his out-of-pocket concierge doctor tell him the more up-to-da…

>doctors are shackled to guidelines

To expand, one of the coverage pillars of malpractice insurance (in the US) is the "standard of care". This is basically what most doctors and their associations consider acceptable, which by definition excludes new, better techniques.

This is both a bug and a feature. A move fast and break things philosophy would cause more harm than good, but it also prevents rapid adoption of incremental improvements.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#147

Post by camel_gopher »

evantbyrne wrote: post #52
camel_gopher wrote: post #3

Tl;dr be affluent enough to be able to afford great medical care and have enough free time for preventative actions

90 day supply of Atorvastatin costs $10. Running costs a pair of shoes.

You have to be able to get the prescription. HMOs (Kaiser specifically) will generally not provide any sort of preventative care in this area unless your numbers are very high. You can’t get access to a cardiologist unless you’ve already had an adverse event.

If you can get time off work and have a PPO, you can get the preventative care.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#148

Post by macNchz »

callmeal wrote: post #88
tgv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all things labeled "processed foods" are bad, it seems. There are enough scientists that say the distinction is often hypocritical (example from an article: a factory-made carrot cake is labeled UPF, but a home-baked one isn't, even though they're practically the same thing). Sugar, fats, and lack of fiber make factory-food unhealthy, they say. Others add that we can't feed the growing metropolitan areas without…

>a factory-made carrot cake is labeled UPF, but a home-baked one isn't, even though they're practically the same thing). Actually they are not. "Practically" is carrying a lot of weight there. The factory baked cake will have a lot more extraneous ingredients and usually has a larger quantity of sugar and fat. Similar to how restaurant food generally has a lot more salt and fat than home cooked food.

Yes, right off the bat a factory made carrot cake will very likely contain dough conditioners, colors, and preservatives that no home cook would put in their scratch made version.

The direct impact of those extra ingredients alone or in combination is not entirely clear at this point, aside from building evidence that people whose diets include more of that seem to be less healthy.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#149

Post by DennisP »

NotGMan wrote: post #125
cd4plus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Our bodies evolved to eat a diverse omnivorous diet and complex carbs + the antioxidants present in vegetables and fruits are anti-oxidative.

This is wrong. Humans have eaten complex carbs only for the last 10k years since agricultural revolution. Before that, outside of a small part of Africa, there physically wasn't enough carbs available to say that they made any substantial amount of our diet. Most ancenstral carbs were uber high in fiber, and very low in glucose (starch) and fructose.

I've taken courses in primitive wilderness survival, and one of the staple foods was grass seed.

Also lots of roots are edible with cooking, and it looks like we've been cooking for about a million years. Then there's wild rice, cattails, beans, berries, all sorts of stuff.

I agree that most wild plants are high in fiber and low in sugar, but there are are a lot of complex carbs to be had, if you have fire.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#150

Post by tonymet »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #29
tonymet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Stress” is so abused and nebulous that it’s impossible to define. Nearly every condition is worsened by “stress” but there’s no way to measure it. And there’s no conclusive way to manage stress either. Medication, psychotropics, self medication, meditation. Nearly all of those are more broadly abused and yet stress “worsens”. One person may run an intense soup kitchen 15 hours a day and feel little stress, and anoth…

Managing cortisol shouldn't be overlooked

“Sleep better, eat better, get less stress, get more activity” is about as helpful as saying “don’t die”.
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