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Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

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Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#301

Post by sn9 »

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)

This is completely wrong.

The majority of your cardio should be LISS unless you have extreme time constraints, but most people can find 30-60 minutes per day to get the recommended time in. This is an intensity at which you can hold a conversation.

If you have time for TV, you have time for watching it from a treadmill.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#302

Post by sn9 »

giardini wrote: post #266

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 per…

Blood lipids and blood pressure are both significant risk factors for heart disease.

It makes zero sense to prioritize one over the other, any more than it makes sense to ignore diet and exercise.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#303

Post by floundy »

mrtksn wrote: post #229
embedding-shape wrote: post #219

The author says this about smoking: > If you smoke, don’t. It’s going to kill you. And then this about alcohol: > I think it’s unreasonable to tell people not to drink alcohol if they like it. Why is it unreasonable to tell people not to drink alcohol, but reasonable to tell people to stop smoking? Shouldn't the smoking section also get a "at least make sure it’s really good tobacco that you enjoy and don’t smoke too…

For alcohol, the default is social drinking which is why you don't have widespread alcoholism in most countries where people consume plenty of alcohol. For smoking the default is constant nicotine top up(the nicotine delivery is instant, lasts seconds to minutes and the withdrawal symptoms starts in an hour). Both harmful of course but the alcohol has much less harmful defaults.

“Alcoholism” is outdated and has been widely replaced by AUD (Alcohol Use Disorder).

I looked at Germany, according to Wikipedia the average consumption of pure ethanol per person per year in Germany as of 2019 was 12.2 liters. This was the 5th highest in the world, and equivalent to 686 standard 5% beers per year.

According to the WHO “moderate drinking” is 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men, so the average German is already consuming above WHO guidelines.

It gets worse when you consider that about 1/4 of Germans don’t consume alcohol at all, and another 1/4 barely consume any, suggesting that the “average” isn’t really telling us much and the 70th, 80th, and 90th percentiles have very concerning consumption numbers. I assume most of those people consider themselves “social drinkers” but statistically they cannot be.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#304

Post by sn9 »

AaronAPU wrote: post #32

I was planning to start getting scans ordered for specific risks like aneurysm or heart attack but what holds me back is the idea the scans will harm me worse than those things. It is very difficult to have any level of confidence with the medical industry so my current approach has been to eat as healthy as possible while staying as fit as I can without undue extreme stress.

Health guidelines take into account when screening/testing is a net harm or benefit for patients in general, and when they move from being a net harm to a net benefit conditional on specific factors like existing diseases, obesity, etc.

Any decent doctor should be at least following those, and you can pretty easily find them from the major disease-focused organizations.

Importantly, there are also recommendations for how often you see a doctor based on things like age and known disease risk. You might discover you have risk factors that are genetically resistant to lifestyle factors, and the earlier you find out, the more leverage you have to decrease your lifetime risk with appropriate medication.

I'd check out the Barbell Medicine podcast episode on the health priorities they recommend patients focus on: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#305

Post by sn9 »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #48
AaronAPU wrote: post #32

I was planning to start getting scans ordered for specific risks like aneurysm or heart attack but what holds me back is the idea the scans will harm me worse than those things. It is very difficult to have any level of confidence with the medical industry so my current approach has been to eat as healthy as possible while staying as fit as I can without undue extreme stress.

As someone who would like to do this but has generally been choosing the easy paths - curious what your diet and exercise regime looks like.

There are specific recommended minimums in the physical activity guidelines about strength training and endurance training where meeting them is likely to significantly reduce your disease risk and improve your health: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#306

Post by floundy »

I didn’t know who this author was previously (Jared Hecht) but I looked up pictures of him and he definitely does not look like he exercises regularly. He’s skinny (e.g. not overweight) but if I passed by him on the street I would not peg him for someone who exercises seriously.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#307

Post by ponector »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #252
ericmcer wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We don't know how to treat obesity 100% though

Are you joking? We do know how to treat eating disorders. Same as we know how to treat opioid addiction or alcoholism.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#308

Post by sn9 »

mac-mc wrote: post #74
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.

IMO, I think that is more of a saturated fat issue, and only a subset of the population is like that. Others solve their health issues through eating a lot of red meat.

Yeah it's definitely more about saturated fat from animal sources.

A leaner cut like tenderloin is fine.

Ultimately you just want to keep the calories you get from saturated fats from animal sources to less than 10% of your daily calories. You can still enjoy a nice steak or burger every once in a while, but they shouldn't be a daily staple if health is a priority.

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#309

Post by floundy »

OutOfHere wrote: post #198
dawnerd wrote: post #25

Was this written via LLM? There’s a link early on to some ai search tool which kinda made me question the validity of everything mentioned.

Please strictly cease and desist from accusing material of being written by an LLM, whether on this site or on any other site. If you want to criticize the material, do so under the good faith assumption that it is written by a human.

Genuinely, why? More people than ever are using LLMs to flood the internet with textual slop far faster than humans who have respect for the craft of writing can generate their own text.

I checked Jared Hecht (the author of this piece’s blog) at jared.xyz and the oldest piece is from March 2023. Why should we give someone who has no evidence of writing anything before the release of ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt that their work is all human written, when all signs point to otherwise?

Re: Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

#310

Post by Jimmc414 »

tonymet wrote: post #150
Jimmc414 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

True that “sleep better, eat better, exercise” is generic advice ignoring constraints. Like telling someone with insomnia, three kids, and a night shift to “sleep better” or telling someone broke to “have more money.”

But being difficult to put into action doesn’t mean the advice is wrong. Sleep deprivation measurably increases cortisol and inflammatory markers. Exercise measurably reduces them. These actions have quantifiable sometimes immediate effects regardless of how we define stress.

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