
Western lifestyle may cause blood pressure to rise with age - YeGoblynQueenne
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/14/western-lifestyle-high-blood-pressure-age-hypertension
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agumonkey
Ironically, when going to less stressful place, many westerners dislike the
slow pace of life, which probably increase their blood pressure for a little
while. I'm in the caribean right now, and things are weird, slow, transient..
but there's a very very gentle side to it. People are way calmer, they smile,
they let you pass in front of them. Not everybody, but it's easy to see the
difference to most European city. We're running nowhere there.

[unsurprisingly] I saw many 90yo persons there with good health. Walking with
family to rituals. Good memory, good spirit. These people often lived in tiny
houses with not much. Something to think about.

~~~
barking
Are you sure you are not just looking at things from the perspective of being
on holidays? The violent crime rate on a lot of Caribbean islands is
horrendous.

~~~
laretluval
Violent crime is not incompatible with a slow paced way of life.

~~~
agumonkey
"Come to our island, life is so relaxed even criminals are cool"

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unicornporn
Sounds like the most reasonable explanation. But here comes the key part in
the article:

> the study is very small – only 11 Yekwana individuals over the age of 40
> took part in the research

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AstralStorm
In short, not even enough for a pilot study. Why did they even bother
publishing it?

~~~
pessimizer
Because it generates headlines that confirm people's preexisting beliefs.

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h2onock
Am I the only one that isn't even 1% surprised by this? Nearly every person I
know that is over 40 years of age does next to no exercise, and eats and
drinks too much.

~~~
chrisseaton
Newly every person over 40 I know is training for a triathalon and eating
sophisticated diets and hardly drinking.

~~~
maxxxxx
I am 50 now and I definitely feel that my body can't endure hard training that
well anymore and little injuries just keep accumulating. I am now doing a
relatively mild yoga routine every morning and I feel I can maintain that for
a long time.

I always wonder how the people over 40 training for a triathlon do in the long
run. Do they accumulate more and more problems until they can't do it anymore?
How do they handle injuries that don't allow them to run anymore?

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nradov
The great thing about triathlon training is that if you have a minor running
injury you can just stop running for a few weeks to let it heal and focus on
swimming, cycling, and resistance training instead. It's totally possible to
endure hard training until you're >80.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Buder#Triathlon_career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Buder#Triathlon_career)

~~~
maxxxxx
This person is an outlier. That's not normal. I used to do kickboxing and yes,
there were a few fighters who did great in their 40s but most after a few
years had massive injuries that prevented them from continuing. I myself have
a bad knee and a bad shoulder so I can't run, cycle or swim without pain.

Used to teach yoga classes. During seminars you could see older famous
teachers do amazing stuff. I thought yoga is is really healthy until I found
out that a lot of them had hip and knee replacements and often lived in
painkillers.

I believe most people simply can't do high intensity stuff from a certain age
on or have to be very selective.

~~~
nradov
Sure there are some outliers and there's obviously survivorship bias but if
you check the results from any large endurance race you'll find many older age
group athletes with finishing times not far off the overall winners. You
really can't compare endurance sports with high impact, full contact sports
like kickboxing.

~~~
maxxxxx
How old are you?

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rkh2018
Well, everyone who is surprised by headlines like this one should pick up some
books. For example "How Not To Die" from Michael Greger, M.D. [1].

[1] [https://nutritionfacts.org/book/](https://nutritionfacts.org/book/)

~~~
hkyeti
That book was a wake up call, for sure.

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lewis500
I keep trying to get my semi-retired parents to change their lifestyle, but
unfortunately they keep getting blood tests which say their cholesterol and
blood pressure and such are perfect. It is all the more frustrating because my
dad smoked for about thirty-five years, and according to his veins it's as
though he never smoked at all. I am thinking of asking the doctor if he can
fudge the results.

In all seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's
due to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the
past few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is
surprisingly good for you.

Another advantage is that they both worked for themselves; they never had
bosses making them do excruciatingly stupid things for years on end.

~~~
coldtea
> _I keep trying to get my semi-retired parents to change their lifestyle, but
> unfortunately they keep getting blood tests which say their cholesterol and
> blood pressure and such are perfect._

So, you'd rather they got worse results?

> _It is all the more frustrating because my dad smoked for about thirty-five
> years, and according to his veins it 's as though he never smoked at all. I
> am thinking of asking the doctor if he can fudge the results. In all
> seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's due
> to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the past
> few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is
> surprisingly good for you._

Sounds very unlikely, and there really haven't been "more and more studies
suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you". At best a few ho-hum studies
recycled by countless news outlets and websites. Coffee is not so miracle food
(actually there are no such "superfoods"), and tons of people have smoked AND
drank lots of coffee and still had bad health.

That said, some of the longer living populations in the Blue Zones smoke just
fine and had for all their lives -- stress free, better foods, and regular
walking is more important.

E.g. according to this a sedentary lifestyle is worse than smoking + diabetes
+ heart disease for your survival stats:

[https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/19/health/study-not-
exercisi...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/19/health/study-not-exercising-
worse-than-smoking/index.html)

~~~
lewis500
I’m obviously joking about wishing they got bad results.

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nradov
There is a significant genetic component to the effect of salt on blood
pressure.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144382/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144382/)

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lazyjones
What is this „western lifestyle“? The article isn‘t clear about it. Could it
be exposure to tabloid journalism?

~~~
koboll
"risks arising from lifestyle, such as high levels of salt in the diet, lack
of exercise and heavy drinking"

Four sentences in.

~~~
mtgx
I really don't think high amounts of salt is a big deal, unless you almost
never eat foods with potassium, too. But even then high levels of salt is
probably a bigger issue for people who already have border-line high blood
pressure due to atherosclerosis, and then eating a lot of salt pushes them
over the limit. It's also much easier for doctors to say "eat less salt" than
to say "eat more potassium-rich foods", even if they know that the two need to
be in balanced.

When doing a 5-day fasting recently I purposefully tried to consume
significant amounts of salt because I felt like I was lacking in electrolytes.
I could barely maintain my blood pressure around 10.5/6\. Normally, it's
around 11.5-12/7.

This is a nice video discussing some studies that show that high levels of
salt is significantly better if it comes with high levels of potassium
compared to low levels of salt but even lower levels of potassium (by ratio):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJ-
ev8Ial8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJ-ev8Ial8)

~~~
OldSchoolJohnny
Yup, good science shows that potassium is far more important than people seem
to generally realize but people have been so busy demonizing salt for so long
that it's sunk into the collective consciousness of all those people who don't
care to keep up on the good quality science being done in the area of
nutrition lately. (There's a lot of crappy "studies" being done in this area
which are unfortunately diluting the facts). Potassium is also the link
between high vegetable intake and proven health benefits, not necessarily the
vegetables themselves and you can get that potassium in other ways without
having to eat like a cow every day.

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rpwverheij
eh, yes western life style. But no mention of the much higher consumption of
animal products in the west - and the link between saturated fat and high
blood pressure?

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OldSchoolJohnny
Because there isn't any proof of such a link? High blood pressure goes hand in
hand with low potassium intake and many people don't eat enough potassium rich
foods.

People keep trying to push their anti meat morality by finding all sorts of
made up reasons why its an issue but good science is firmly unable to prove
all those myriad of made up fear mongering links.

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rhacker
It's the dairy in our diets. Baby-calf growth hormone is what we're consuming.
It's a liquid specifically designed to make small cows get big really fast. It
should never have been introduced into human food.

~~~
ArrayList
Underrated comment. Casein protein has also been linked to cancer[1].

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166373/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166373/)

