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Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

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Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#261

Post by giardini »

tonymet wrote: post #144
pstuart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tonymet says >nicotine is likely one of the best appetite-control , cognative-enhancing and anti-anxiety medications ever known to man.

Is this not under-reported? I have known several people for whom smoking appears to be truly necessary. One said he was prescribed smoking to control his "shakes".

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#262

Post by reducesuffering »

"This means regular exercise (both strength training, ideally 3x per week, and cardio training that helps to improve V02 max like Zone 2 training)"

Actually, V02 max is best improved through High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) like doing 400m sprints 8x with a couple minutes rest inbetween. V02 max is famous for being one of the best predictors of longevity.

Zone 2 training (light jogging) is important in tandem (80% of exercise ideally), especially for overall cardiovascular health and lowering heart rate.

Best thing I ever did for my health was start running (mostly jogging) 4-5 times a week. It's amazing how much your health can be improved with 4x 45 minute jogs (just 3 hours/wk). I can consume practically any caloric food for needed energy and all my health metrics have been substantially linearly increasing since I started.

"the stuff that’s not good for you: pasta and pizza and bread."

Tell that to the paragons of fitness in marathon running or olympic swimming. There are none of them on low carb. The best cardio health requires cardio exercise and cardio exercise requires carbs as energy. Of course if you're not going to exercise and are okay with 50th percentile health, ya carbs will hurt you then because youre not using them.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#263

Post by phainopepla2 »

programmertote wrote: post #232

> All of these can be accessed through bloodwork and urinalysis and can be done at a local Quest Labs (I’d venture to bet there’s one within a 10-mile radius of your home), prescribed by your doctor, and will likely cost anywhere between $80-$120 out of pocket. A frustrating thing about this suggestion -- if I tell my physician (I live in the US) that I want these unusual tests prescribed, s/he would scorn at me (as…

For the blood tests, at least, you can get them directly from a lab with no physician gatekeeping.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#264

Post by 64718283661 »

tonymet wrote: post #144
pstuart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've actually considered taking nicotine for these reasons. But I don't because it appears you build tolerance very quickly.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#265

Post by leni536 »

endominus wrote: post #205
Aurornis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ApoB is shaping up to be an incremental improvement in measurements, but health and fitness influencers have taken the marginal improvement and turned it into a hot topic to talk about. This happens with everything in fitness: To remain topi…

>If you were given the choice of two different dangerous roads where one road had a 30% lower chance of getting into a life-threatening car crash, you would probably think that the choice was obvious, not that the two roads were basically the same. You could absolutely think that they were basically the same, depending on the base rate. The differece between a one-in-a-million and 0.7-in-a-million is 30%, but it woul…

There is an xkcd for that:

https://xkcd.com/1252/

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#266

Post by giardini »

The discussion seems unduly focused on lipids, whereas I would think that blood pressure would be a, if not the, primary concern.

Also for those who do take blood pressure medication: never quickly change the dosage, and especially never quit taking it w/o supervision!

I've seen several untimely deaths b/c someone ran out of their BP medication and could not get to a pharmacist quickly enough. Alternatively the person became irritated with the medication and simply stopped taking it.

Maybe part of starting BP medication should be the doctor giving you a "safety package" that includes a full month's worth of the drug and is to be put on a shelf somewhere where you can get to it should your usual prescription run out.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#267

Post by rgmerk »

wrs wrote: post #206
malfist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His evidence is also kinda weak. And appeal to authority largely about someone who he's paying to tell him he has health problems. The incentives aren't aligned. I also disagree that the 50the percentile is the breakpoint between healthy and unhealthy. There's a lot more to deciding those ranges beside "well half of the population has better numbers"

You may have missed the stat that 30% of the population that’s the median of will die of heart disease. You don’t want to be at the median.

100% of the population will die of something.

If I die at 90 of a heart attack havjng maintained the ability to live independently up until then, I’d take that as a massive win compared to my relatives suffering through a decade of me with worsening dementia.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#268

Post by brandonb »

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…

> 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.

Part of this is just that insurance coverage lags science. We've known that ApoB is more accurate than LDL since the 1990's or 2000's, but to be covered by insurance, several more steps have to happen.

First, the major professional societies (like the American College of Cardiology or National Lipid Associations) have to issue formal guidelines.

Then, the USPSTF (US Preventive Services Task Force) needs to review all of the evidence. They tend to do reviews only every 5 or 10 years. (Countries aside from the US have different organizations that perform a similar role.)

If the USPSTF issues an "A" or "B" rating, then insurance companies are legally obligated to cover ApoB testing. But that also introduces a year or two lag since medical policies are revised and apply to the next plan year.

The net effect is that the entire system is 17 years, on average, behind research.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#269

Post by reducesuffering »

toast0 wrote: post #167
Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt a great trick about exercise: find a podcast or audio book that you really enjoy listening to. Here's the trick: you're only allowed to listen when you're exercising. Also with food and drink: place friction between the treat and yourself. The easiest example is to not have biscuits / alcohol in the house. Bonus tip: alcohol free beer is really good these days.

If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio. OTOH, it's not a bad way to do interval training while watching sports, go hard when they're yammering, slow down when the sports are happening (or, if you're watching soccer, you can go hard most of the time and then slow down for the replay if anything happens, which is unlikely)

> If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio.

Nonsense. Elite distance runners are doing 80% of their miles at essentially a conversational jog with a starkly lower HR than the 20% of intense miles. Cardio exercise under all levels of intensity is optimal, not just easy or just hard.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#270

Post by rootusrootus »

ericmcer wrote: post #246
adammarples wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article makes a valid point: stop worrying about 90% of the other stuff and focus on the thing that will almost certainly kill you - heart disease - for which there are easy diagnostic and preventative measures. I think they're arguing for a better allocation of resources, if anything.

Isn't the global population like 50% obese? What is your actual risk of dying from it if you are relatively in shape and in your 40s?

It depends. Overall, lowest all-cause death indexed on BMI seems to be around 27 plus or minus [0]. Interestingly, for all subjects (not just healthy non-smokers), BMI 30-32 isn't really associated with a dramatic increase in all cause mortality.

Obviously life is more complicated than just one measure. I figure this is just another data point saying BMI is useful for population studies and not great for individual diagnosis.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10321632/

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