As a homebody, I had very low vitamin D in my previous lab blood tests, high blood pressure, etc. years ago.

why is it always about people with high blood pressure? I have low blood pressure, which at times makes me light-headed, but if I eat a little extra salt, my blood volume increases and everything is cool. So salt isn't "healthy" or "unhealthy". All depends on what your body's needs are. Same with sugar... if your body NEEDS sugar (I.E. after a workout to give a little insulin spike to help absorb protein) then it's healthy, if your body DOESN'T NEED sugar, (I.E. you've been sitting in bed all day playing WOW and want to get a mountain dew) then it will be unhealthy.

I did a few months ago, so I lowered my sugar consumption like from drinks. Doctors didn't say I have diabetes. However, they did say I have high blood pressures (family tree members have it and had to take daily tablets) and very low vitamin D (not an outdoor guy; taking pills and trying to go outside for at least 15 minutes per day). I have lots of allergies (itches, leaks, etc.) too.

I had high blood pressures, low vitamin D, and high sugar levels. I have to take pills and have less sugar.

F that S. I'm the first to react even when it's not life threatening. srsly... WTF is wrong with people! I know I'm a person too, so inextricably linked with everyone else, but I just don't understand this...

About a month ago there was an earthquake here in California and NO ONE in my office except for me reacted. Literally no one except for myself... that's crazy. WHY!

One guy was from out of state and this was his first quake. Everyone from the leadership of my team was sitting in a conference room nearby my desk, talking about how used to them they all are now; and this ignorant out of state man was saying similar things like "I was watching you guys to see how to react."

After crawling from under my desk, I ran into their room and yelled at them saying they were NOT being very smart and told the guy from (Pennsylvania?) that he should go under a desk if he's in doors and yada yada yada. He scoffed at me.

He scoffed my good advice. Ooooh, ignore the crazy person who actually knows what to goddamn do in an emergency. Why? Well, mostly because I'm an asshole -- but that's the thing, I'm an asshole when I'm right (or believe I'm right -- I am always ready for education when I am wrong).

Of course, as always, for being a contrary and vocal minority I was ridiculed. Office politics and trying to be part of the swarm will get you KILLED. God, you'd think working in a creative industry would weed out fools, but it doesn't. Same dumb asses every where you go.

I'm considering becoming a reasonable person, but goddamn high blood pressure. I need to calm down or I'll die from a heart attack -- caused by fools! Ahh, how fitting.

Ridicule me after I save your fucking life, ingrates.

My guess would be he stuck to zero calorie drinks and avoided fries.

Had a quick on their nutritional website, a Big Mac is 520 calories, which is not great but not absurd. The issue is, you add a large fries (500) and coke (280) to that and you've added exactly 150% more calories on top.

All up being 1300 calories or about 2/3rds of your daily intake in one meal. Provided you avoided the sides though, it wouldn't be too hard to stick within the limits.

The issue is that MCD makes the minimum mandated attempt to educate customers. Australia legislates that food energy levels be published in a prominent fashion alongside the rough recommended daily energy intake of 8700kJ. They usually publish most of these on the side in small font. Having been over in France recently they didn't have them, I'm sure that's the case in most countries.

The larger issue with MCD and other fast food is the use of trans-fats and excessive sodium.

Trans-fats act as an insanely effective preservatives that keeps their produce looking like it'd been cryogenically frozen even years on. They're also have a reputation for clogging arteries causing heart attacks, strokes and the like.

Sodium which boosts blood pressure when ingested is a flavour enhancer which is probably why it's used in excessive amounts (e.g. a Big Mac has 40% of recommended daily Sodium). Even if this guy kept within calorie limits he would have easily been breaching recommended Sodium levels and in the long term would be elevating his risk of high blood pressure, stroke or various kidney diseases.

Exposure to gravity, or lack of it, will eventually cause changes in the body as it evolves. Not the long heads and bodies vaire2ube alludes to but other things, like maybe a resistance to osteoporosis.

If you imagine everyone on earth suddenly has to live in a weightless environment I'm sure you can imagine how it would help some people and damage others. Those with dangerously high blood pressure could end up bursting a blood vessel in the brain, killing them, whereas others with dangerously low blood pressure would survive better. Weightlessness would lead to selection favouring low blood pressure in this instance. I'm not sure if this exact example would happen, but I'm sure you can imagine that making a huge change to the environment such as removing the effect of gravity would have a profound effect on our bodies, and that effect could then lead to natural selection and evolution.

Bmacs You are moving the goalposts.
You say above that your key gripe is in using BMI to approximate health. Not the likelihood of ones imminent demise.
Lets clear this up.
1. You are making a conversation about morbidity about mortality.
2. You are dealing with data specific to BMI as it relates to Blood pressure and mortality as it specifically relates to hypertensive individuals. Is your suggestion that High blood pressure and cardiac events are the only risks involved with obesity? What about things that don't kill you but directly impact the quality of your life? Thinking diabeties here, among other things.
3. You seem to be trying to somehow debunk the concept that obesity has ANY negative health consequences by dismissing the other articles cited.
4. What biomarkers are you concerned with. What study are you focused on? There are plenty of studies surrounding biomarkers for obesity and comorbitidy. Here is a nature article directly citing that.

What are you actually suggesting here? Obesity is causal to NO life threatening or impacting diseases? That it has NO negative health consequences?
>> ^bmacs27:

@scannex Okay, none of your articles whatsoever considered any other biomarkers that may be correlated with obesity, let alone other factors like socioeconomic status, other behavioral choices, etc. For example: In this plot from this article of the oxford journal of epidemiology shows that the relationship between BMI and mortality breaks down for women with a systolic blood pressure below about 150mmHg excluding morbidly obese women(those with a BMI between 40 and 75). It also shows a "protective effect," in terms of mortality risk, of obesity in men with high blood pressure.
The article cites at least 9 articles and I quote, "The associations between body weight, raised blood pressure, and mortality remain controversial." Thus, you're wrong, this is very much a "jury is still out" sort of a question.

@scannex Okay, none of your articles whatsoever considered any other biomarkers that may be correlated with obesity, let alone other factors like socioeconomic status, other behavioral choices, etc. For example: In this plot from this article of the oxford journal of epidemiology shows that the relationship between BMI and mortality breaks down for women with a systolic blood pressure below about 150mmHg excluding morbidly obese women(those with a BMI between 40 and 75). It also shows a "protective effect," in terms of mortality risk, of obesity in men with high blood pressure.

The article cites at least 9 articles and I quote, "The associations between body weight, raised blood pressure, and mortality remain controversial." Thus, you're wrong, this is very much a "jury is still out" sort of a question.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'japan, high blood pressure, weird, 00s, tea, piss stop, goma mugi cha, suntory' to 'japan, high blood pressure, weird, 00s, tea, piss stop, goma mugi cha, suntory, fire' - edited by Fusionaut

>> ^snoozedoctor:

By the way, I work on the morbidly obese every day. The place I work is designated a "Center of Excellence" for Bariatric surgery. Yes, doing bariatric surgery helps prevent a lot of complications down the road, like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. With the US struggling to provide even basic health care needs to the poor, do I get a little miffed with all the health care dollars consumed because of self-induced diseases, like smoking and over-eating? I freely admit I do.


And so you should, you have reason to feel like that. I cringe when I think how much obese people are costing the NHS and how if I'm not careful I will become one of those people whose weight will cause me health problems. I have on and off dieted most of my adult life, I am very much not content with my weight for a variety of reasons. And I am fully aware exactly what I have to do and what will work. The problem is and I imagine it's the same for most fat people, it's harder to give up on something you can't completely avoid. There is literally no way to take away the temptation when food is required to live.

And of course you work with it and you hear day after day, excuses as to why they can't lose weight, and you think there is NO such thing as can't. Well that's true, but it's like telling someone who has a smoking habit they can't quit, "well you shouldn't have started in the first place." It's too friggin late, the damage is done! And like we were saying, getting obese often isn't something you have had any control over, it started off in childhood. And then, you are stuck with the life long struggle of trying to beat an addiction. It's not like drugs, where if you stay away from it long enough and get it out of your system, you only have a mental addiction to contend with. You've got to eat. Willpower isn't something you can just switch on, if ONLY it was.

And then there's the exercise thing. Such a simple thing to do, burn off more calories than you're consuming. No one can argue that is the ONLY automatic guarantee you will lose weight. But consider that for someone fat and the bigger they are the worse it is, exercise is probably twice if not more times as difficult to do. It hurts, there's pressure on your joints, you're out of breath within a couple of minutes, you ache for hours afterwards because you aren't necessarily flexible enough to stretch out properly. Really we should all go swimming, it's the best thing, has always worked for me, but at certain weights I imagine getting into a swimming cossie is the last thing they want to do, people stare and pull faces. So yeah, it's very easy to give up when every solution is miles harder than for the people telling you what you should be doing. None of this is excuses, I hope you have garnered from what I've said that I entirely understand where thin people or health professionals are coming from. But without actually having had a weight problem themselves, that completely dismissive attitude and oversimplification is thoughtless at best and fucking arrogant at worst.

By the way, I work on the morbidly obese every day. The place I work is designated a "Center of Excellence" for Bariatric surgery. Yes, doing bariatric surgery helps prevent a lot of complications down the road, like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. With the US struggling to provide even basic health care needs to the poor, do I get a little miffed with all the health care dollars consumed because of self-induced diseases, like smoking and over-eating? I freely admit I do.

i agree with everything you just said, but i think you might be over estimating how much of it is science.
it's a great deal business. at least in the US. where medicine is mostly for profit. for huge huge profits.
medical RESEARCH is in fact, science. and i have faith in it. the dispensing of medicine is however, a business.

i'm saying this as someone who has degrees in health science fields. spent 8 years as a health care professional. spent 1/3 of that time doing administrative work. and now owns a business as a CAM practitioner.... which btw, is also a good bit business.

i'd also like to stick up for alternative medicine here.
a good deal of it is bullshit. any results are simply the placebo effect. but i don't think we should discount the placebo effect. it's an amazing mechanism. if you feel less depressed because someone hit you with a tuning fork and you didn't have to take any pills or go to a counselor, then okay. that's awesome. i still think you probably need counseling, but whatever. i also think you should take a good hard look at your diet and how much exercise you're doing. but how much does it cost in the US to go to a counselor, go to a doctor, get your anti-depressants and have a nutritionist and a phsyical trainer help you learn how to excercise and eat right? it's probably cheaper to pay someone $80 to hit you with that tuning fork and convince yourself it's going to work.

I make a decent living practicing complementary health care. but i don't tell anyone they need to be hit with a tuning fork or have someone throw energy beams out of their hands at them. i tell people they need to stretch, and i teach them how. i tell people they need to sleep properly, and i help them do it. i tell people they need to find an effective way to deal with stress, and i give them that. i tell people they need to find a form of exercise that's right for their bodies and lifestyles, and i help them find it. a lot of people just need someone to trust and someone to talk to. and that's why they call me a "therapist". i never tell people to go against their doctor's orders. i never tell anyone to stop taking their medicine or not to be vaccinated. and that's why what i do is COMPLEMENTARY.

we're too quick to dismiss a different approach when it comes to health care.
the same people are also very quick to be able to recognize the problems with our for profit health care systems when it comes to political discussions. the profit motive hasn't just tainted medicine in terms of disparity. it's tainted it in terms of effectiveness. this is where a holistic approach is good. it's not effect to only treat the symptom. if someone is overweight, has high blood pressure, their stress is out of control and they have diabetes. prescribing them pills, while necessary in the short term, is not at all where the "care" should end. i know doctors will also tell their patients to eat right and exercise but they do not teach them how to do it. because for profit health care doesn't think that is profitable. a for profit system does not want you healthy.

soooo... the market has opened up. if the way we practice medicine and viewed health in this country was working, people wouldn't pay to get hit with tuning forks. oh and half of this is a problem with our education system.
>> ^dag:

^Yes, how dare anyone question the all-knowing oracles of medical knowledge.
I think the reason that many geeky type people always toe the main-stream medical line is because they conflate medicine with science (which we all love). Yes, it's almost the same, but if I had to draw it as a venn diagram, there would be a crescent of over-hang. Medicine to me is 80% science and then the rest is filled in with dogma, patriarchy and business ($$).
That crescent of non-science is the part that makes me squirm. I don't think it's that wrong to question medical programs like vaccinations- with the idea that it may be being pushed non-scientifically by the medical industrial complex. (big pharma).
Bill Maher is not a kook.

Something to keep in mind when reading about coffee research is to check and see whether or not the "coffee" they refer to is a caffeine supplement or if it truly is coffee. It is found that coffee and synthetic caffeine supplements are very different with regards to how the body processes them and their effects. Pharmacists will tell you focusing on one chemical compound without researching how the other compounds and how they interact with each other is bad science. Which is way "coffee research" should focus on the over all product and not just one chemical compound.

Everything we put in our body has negative and positive consequences what we have to figure out when using an item for its benefit is whether or not the negatives are of bigger consequence then the positives.

i.e. which is worse, high blood pressure or not getting a boner? Thanks to Viagra old men everywhere now get to reconcile this decision regularly.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Most importantly, I wasn't suggesting that the current setup is in any way acceptable, only that what @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.videosift.com/member/ghark" title="member since September 30th, 2009" class="profilelink">ghark alluded to wasn't accurate.
Exactly what sort of life-saving surgery can be done at the GP's office? Or were you just trying to change the topic? Argumentum ad misericordiam.


I admit I was a bit surprised by that...I thought you were one of those unhappy with our system. Apparently I was just reading a bit too much into your statement here.

Is lifesaving surgery the only health care that counts? Many, if not most, types of care can be provided by a GP. Hospitals are for acute care. High blood pressure, diabetes, any number of chronic conditions, for example, are totally inappropriate for hospitals and yet utterly crucial for a healthy life. But hospitals are the only ones required to accept any and all patients, and even a brief look makes it clear that many hospitals do not (they have plenty of ways to game the system, legal or otherwise).