Kendrick on Blood Pressure

After my brief run in with hypertension I still look to monitor my BP readings.  Malcolm Kendrick has put up another superb piece on the measurement of BP and a few other passages that calm anyone who is tarred with the 'lower is better' broad brush.

My readings have fallen massively since I've resolved the underlying cause (sleep quality/'cold-showers & cortisol').  My BP is still very dynamic but morning and evening readings regularly touch sub-120/sub-75.  Resting pulse is often in the low 40s.  I am happy with where I am, and improving sleep quality seems to have brought a host of other benefits.

The reason for this post is to draw attention to something in Kendrick's post that really stood out, to do with 'a series of bullet point in the European Journal of Cardiology entitled ‘There is a non-linear relationship between mortality and blood pressure’':

• •Drugs that lower the blood pressure by about the same amount have very different effects on outcomes
  
  •Cardiovascular benefits of ACE-inhibitors (Angiotensin Converting Enzyme – Inhibitors), independent of blood pressure, are not observed with calcium antagonists, despite the latter having more pronounced effects on blood pressure.
  
  •HOPE (Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation study) demonstrated that ACE inhibitors provided diverse and profound cardiovascular benefits, with only trivial differences in blood pressure between the treatment and control groups
  
  •ALLHAT (Antihypertensive and Lipid Lowering treatment to prevent Heart Attack Trial) showed a dramatic difference in cardiovascular risk between alpha blockers and diuretics, with essentially no difference in their effect on blood pressure. The investigators of ALLHAT concluded ‘blood pressure lowering is an inadequate surrogate marker for health benefits in hypertension.’

We're big fans of MK here at Natural Messiah.  His reputation continues to grow!

Heart of the Matter

Heart of the Matter Part 1 Dietary Villains (also in Popcorn).

Slow Metabolism

Laughably there is talk of drugs to treat a slow metabolism.  Why no talk of gene expression and efforts to effect epigenetic change?

Slow metabolism 'obesity excuse' true!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24610296#sa-ns_mchannel=rss%26ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa?utm_source=twitterfeed%26utm_medium=twitter

Sat Fat Myth

http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340

The Moment We've Waited For

Saturated fat heart disease 'myth'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24625808#sa-ns_mchannel=rss%26ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa?utm_source=twitterfeed%26utm_medium=twitter

Vitamin A Overdose

A heads up for those in the UK for tonight's episode of "Trust Me I'm A Doctor" (BBC Two at 20:00 BST on Thursday 17 October 2013), which has a piece on vitamin A toxicity as experienced by polar explorer Douglas Mawson:

• A month into their journey, one of the team, along with the tent, most of the provisions and six dogs plunged into a crevasse, never to be seen again. Mawson and the other surviving member, Xavier Mertz, started to return to base, surviving in part by eating the remaining dogs. After a few weeks Mertz developed stomach pains and diarrhoea. Then his skin started to peel off and his hair fell out. He died incontinent and delirious a few days later.
  
  Mawson suffered similar symptoms. With the kind of understatement typical of his generation of polar explorers he described the skin of the soles of his feet peeling off: "The sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer... The new skin underneath was very much abraded and raw."
  
  It was the suffering of early explorers and sailors that motivated the first studies of vitamins and their deficiency diseases. At first sight Mawson's story seems to be another such tale - starvation combined with a lack of some vital nutrient. In fact, Mawson's description of his symptoms is an almost textbook description of vitamin A overdose - probably from eating dog liver. As little as 100g of husky liver could give a hungry explorer a fatal dose.  

Non-UK residents can see this program on the BBC iPlayer.

I've asked before where people who 'pill-pop' think we got our vitamins from in our ancestral past.  Pill-popping is a 'downstream' intervention which may or may not have the desired effect.  Better to tackle problems at their root and make the necessary lifestyle adaptions.

Pill popping may also be seen as reductionist to the extent that taking a vitamin pill ignores all and every other compound and bioactive ingredient in the food or foods from which humans may have historically sourced the said vitamin.   All this before we get to the question of the bioavailability of vitamins in pill form.

Unless directed by a doctor, the advice from here is save your money and eat real food!  What is real food?  You KNOW it when you see it.  It 'ain't difficult.

Industrial Living

An article recognising we live in a culture that owes more to the industrial revolution and factory-working than it does to human biology.

Breakfast Champions or Chumps? How Breakfast Can Accelerate Aging.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-spector-md/fasting-aging_b_3996816.html