Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Firstly, what is high blood pressure vs normal, and what do those blood pressure readings mean?
Rather than take up undue space here, we’ll just quickly link to…
Blood Pressure Readings Explained (With A Colorful Chart)
More details of specifics, at:
Hypotension | Normal | Elevated | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Danger zone
Keeping Blood Pressure Down
As with most health-related things (and in fact, much of life in general), prevention is better than cure.
People usually know “limit salt” and “manage stress”, but there’s a lot more to it!
Salt isn’t as big a factor as you probably think
That doesn’t mean go crazy on the salt, as it can cause a lot of other problems, including organ failure. But it does mean that you can’t skip the salt and assume your blood pressure will take care of itself.
This paper, for example, considers “high” sodium consumption to be more than 5g per day, and urinary excretion under 3g per day is considered to represent a low sodium dietary intake:
Sodium Intake and Hypertension
Meanwhile, health organizations often recommend to keep sodium intake to under 2g or under 1.5g
Top tip: if you replace your table salt with “reduced sodium” salt, this is usually sodium chloride (regular table salt) cut with potassium chloride, which is almost as “salty” tastewise, but obviously contains less sodium. Not only that, but potassium actually helps the body eliminate sodium, too.
The rest of what you eat is important too
The Mediterranean Diet is as great for this as it is for most health conditions.
If you sometimes see the DASH diet mentioned, that stands for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension”, and is basically the Mediterranean Diet with a few tweaks.
What are the tweaks?
- Beans went down a bit in priority
- Red meat got removed entirely instead of “limit to a tiny amount”
- Olive oil was deprioritized, and/but vegetable oil is at the bottom of the list (i.e., use sparingly)
You can check out the details here, with an overview and examples:
DASH Eating Plan—Description, Charts, and Recipes
Don’t drink or smoke
And no, a glass of red a day will not help your heart. Alcohol does make us feel relaxed, but that is because of what it does to our brain, not what it does to our heart.
In reality, even a single drink will increase blood pressure. Yes, really:
And smoking? It’s so bad that even second-hand smoke increases blood pressure:
Get those Zs in
Sleep is a commonly underestimated/forgotten part of health, precisely because in a way, we’re not there for it when it happens. We sleep through it! But it is important, including to protect against hypertension:
Short- and long-term health consequences of sleep disruption
Move your body!
Moving your body often is far more important for your heart than running marathons or bench-pressing your spouse.
Those 150 minutes “moderate exercise” (e.g. walking) per week are important, and can be for example:
- 22 minutes per day, 7 days per week
- 25 minutes per day, 6 days per week
- 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week
- 75 minutes per day, 2 days per week
If you’d like to know more about the science and evidence for this, as well as practical suggestions, you can download the complete second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans here (it’s free, and no sign-up required!)
If you prefer a bite-size summary, then here’s their own:
Top 10 Things to Know About the Second Edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans
PS: Want a blood pressure monitor? We don’t sell them (or anything else), but for your convenience, here’s a good one you might want to consider.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
What Is Progesterone Intolerance & How Can We Fix It?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Progesterone is great, unless…
Right hormone, wrong way
Although progesterone intolerance isn’t an official textbook diagnosis, clinicians use the term to describe bothersome side effects from progesterone, most often from oral micronized progesterone (e.g. Prometrium, Utrogestan, etc).
How it happens: progesterone crosses the blood–brain barrier and can slow things down in the central nervous system and digestive tract—similar to its effects during early pregnancy, when progesterone is highest.
Progesterone is nevertheless important for: metabolism (with this in turn having many knock-on effects), mood, bone turnover, and is protective against some cancers (e.g. uterine/endometrial cancer*), as well as improving sleep quality without usually being a sedative (simply, for most people it won’t make you sleep, but it’ll make your sleep more restful when you do sleep).
*Note: at one point, Dr. Hirsch mentions that you don’t need progesterone if for example you’ve had a hysterectomy, but it seems she’s only talking about the cancer issue in that case, i.e. you can’t get uterine cancer without a uterus, and endometrial cancer is rather dependent on having endometriosis, which while strictly speaking isn’t impossible to get without a uterus (endometriosis is, after all, hormonally-mediated uterine tissue getting generated somewhere it shouldn’t and it can even appear far from the uterus’s normal position) but it’s very unlikely, as we may hypothesize that it requires at least one starting cell to proliferate, and in the case of uterine tissue appearing apparently spontaneously elsewhere, it’s probable that a cell that that was originally grown correctly in utero accidentally took a tour through the circulatory system to get somewhere else, where it got stuck and then proliferated, mistaking its new location for a uterine site.
However, all the other reasons to take progesterone still stand whether you have a uterus or not, with bone turnover being the least negotiable consideration.
That said, there are possible side effects, including sedation, dizziness (sometimes severe), next-day grogginess, mood worsening and/or depression, bloating, constipation, and water retention that can make weight appear to jump up suddenly.
If this is a problem, the recommended solution is simply to take it a different way, with transdermal options being best—however, since compounded progesterone creams don’t absorb well, this makes pessaries a top choice (this writer uses Cyclogest pessaries and has never had a problem with them, for what it’s worth).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
How Estrogen & Progesterone Affect Your Pain
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Broccoli vs Dandelion Greens – Which is Healthier?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Our Verdict
When comparing broccoli to dandelion greens, we picked the dandelions.
Why?
Not quite a like-for-like comparison here, but it’s interesting to compare these two green nutritional heavyweights!
In terms of macros, dandelion greens have more fiber and carbs, the former being more important, we call this a nominal win for dandelion greens, but an argument could be made for a tie.
In the category of vitamins, broccoli has more of vitamins B5, B9, and C, while dandelion greens have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B8, E, and K, winning this round easily (and being an especially good source of vitamin K).
Looking at minerals next, broccoli has more selenium, while dandelion greens have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and potassium, winning another round easily.
In other considerations, broccoli is a good source of sulforaphane (see the “learn more” link below for details), while dandelion greens are much higher in polyphenols. So, we call this round a tie.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for dandelion greens, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Broccoli Sprouts & Sulforaphane
Enjoy!
Share This Post
-
The 3 Ways Cognitive Decline Can Go
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
There is not a “one-size fits all” model of cognitive decline, but when it comes to Alzheimer’s, there are three clear pathways that cognitive decline can take.
So, what are they?
This makes a big difference
Researchers (Dr. Reisa Sperling et al.) found that people’s cognitive decline trajectories cluster into the following three groups:
- Stable
- Slow decline
- Fast decline
Now, that may not sound groundbreaking, but the fact that it is three distinct clusters rather than a sliding scale is actually quite important.
This new information recontextualizes and adds extra relevance to what we wrote about here: Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good ← this is our “Expert Insights” feature on Dr. Gayatri Devi, She’s a neurologist, board-certified in neurology, pain medicine, psychiatry, brain injury medicine, and behavioral neurology. She’s also a Clinical Professor of Neurology, and Director of Long Island Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and we could continue all day with her qualifications, awards and achievements but then we’d run out of space. Suffice it to say, she knows her stuff. In the above-linked article, we talk about how her work explores Alzheimer’s epidemiology, diagnosis, pathology, and planning, with a strong side of social destigmatization and a healthy dose of calm about it. If you like that, you should definitely also check out: The Spectrum of Hope: An Optimistic and New Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias – by Dr. Gayatri Devi
Another reason that this matters is because it means we now know that current Alzheimer’s prevention trials are almost certainly underestimating treatment effects, because of how averaging all participants together can dilute the appearance of positive changes when participants from two out of three clusters don’t decline during the study window.
Dr. Sperling argues (convincingly) that future prevention trials should stratify participants by risk of decline, rather than treating all biomarker-positive individuals as progressing similarly.
About those biomarkers: higher plasma p-tau217, elevated tau PET imaging, and smaller hippocampal volume at baseline were the clearest indicators of quicker future decline, and these biomarker-based models predicted who would stay stable versus decline (and at which pace) with about 70% accuracy.
With this in mind, there are good possibilities for future avenue of research, for example asking such questions as:
❝What is different about certain patients that makes them more resilient—and can these insights be leveraged to slow down Alzheimer’s disease in others? ❞
~ Dr. Michael Donohue, press contact for the study
You can read the paper in full, here: Divergent patterns of cognitive decline in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease: Implications for secondary prevention trials
Want to improve your odds?
We’ve written quite a bit about reducing the risk of cognitive decline in general and Alzheimer’s in particular; here are just a few:
- Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid
- How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
- How To Walk Away From Alzheimer’s
- How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
- Take Care Of Your Lymphatic System To Beat Cognitive Decline
- Goodnight, Glymphatic System: How Your Sleep Position Changes Dementia Risk
- The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The Pain Switch Formula – by Noah Collins
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The author, a physiotherapist, tackles the problem of pain (acute and chronic), with the three-step method:
- Release
- Restore
- Reinforce
In other words, understanding what is going on and addressing it in a way that eases pain immediately, restores normal function, and reinforces it against future recurrence.
Which may sound like a magical fix, and certainly the title leans into that, but the methodology is sound and based in good science, and explained in detail with regard to a long list of things that can (and commonly do) go wrong with the human body.
The style is a little sensationalized for this reviewer’s personal taste, but it doesn’t detract from the large amount of practical information contain within this book.
Bottom line: if you’d like to deal with a pain in a way that isn’t just masking it or otherwise learning to live with it, then this book can help with very many causes of such.
Click here to check out The Pain Switch Formula, and restore pain-free mobility!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Live Long, Die Short – by Dr. Roger Landry
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
First know: “die short” is not about your height—although on average, short people do live longer, partly because insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) promotes both tallness and accelerated DNA damage (thus, aging and cancer), and partly because if someone is very tall, it can cause circulatory problems, and without a nice easy flow of blood through the brain, bad things happen (such as accumulation of harmful detritus in the brain, and increased stroke risk too).
Next know: “die short” is, in this book, actually about shortening the decline at the end of life. Sometimes people say “I don’t want to live 10 years longer; they’ll be the 10 most miserable years”, but in fact if we look after our health, we will be healthy for perhaps >9.5 of our last 10 years, while an unhealthy person may just get their expected “10 most miserable years” 10 or 20 years earlier (and then die).
So, in short (so to speak), it’s about increasing healthspan.
To enjoy the longest and healthiest healthspan, Dr. Landry offers 10 tips. We’ll not keep them a secret; they are:
- Use it or lose it
- Keep moving
- Challenge your brain
- Stay connected
- Lower your risks
- Never act your age
- Wherever you are, be fully there
- Find your purpose
- Have children in your life
- Laugh to a better life
Each of these has a chapter devoted to them, in section 2 of the book (section 1 is about what we know about healthy aging, and section 3 is about where we go from here).
You’ll notice that one item not generally found on such lists is “have children in your life”; to be clear, they don’t have to be your children, and/but they do have to be actual current children; any now-grown-up progeny aren’t what’s being talked about here (wonderful as they may be, any support role they may play gets filed under “stay connected” instead).
The style is mostly impersonal pop-science with occasional personal anecdotes, and the book’s formatting (many subheadings within chapters) makes it easy to read a bit at a time, if that’s your preference. There’s a modest, but extant, bibliography.
Bottom line: if you’d like to stay younger as you get older, this book goes into a lot of detail about 10 ways to do just that.
Click here to check out Live Long, Die Short, and live long, die short!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
I’ve been given opioids after surgery to take at home. What do I need to know?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Opioids are commonly prescribed when you’re discharged from hospital after surgery to help manage pain at home.
These strong painkillers may have unwanted side effects or harms, such as constipation, drowsiness or the risk of dependence.
However, there are steps you can take to minimise those harms and use opioids more safely as you recover from surgery.
Flystock/Shutterstock Which types of opioids are most common?
The most commonly prescribed opioids after surgery in Australia are oxycodone (brand names include Endone, OxyNorm) and tapentadol (Palexia).
In fact, about half of new oxycodone prescriptions in Australia occur after a recent hospital visit.
Most commonly, people will be given immediate-release opioids for their pain. These are quick-acting and are used to manage short-term pain.
Because they work quickly, their dose can be easily adjusted to manage current pain levels. Your doctor will provide instructions on how to adjust the dosage based on your pain levels.
Then there are slow-release opioids, which are specially formulated to slowly release the dose over about half to a full day. These may have “sustained-release”, “controlled-release” or “extended-release” on the box.
Slow-release formulations are primarily used for chronic or long-term pain. The slow-release form means the medicine does not have to be taken as often. However, it takes longer to have an effect compared with immediate-release, so it is not commonly used after surgery.
Controlling your pain after surgery is important. This allows you get up and start moving sooner, and recover faster. Moving around sooner after surgery prevents muscle wasting and harms associated with immobility, such as bed sores and blood clots.
Everyone’s pain levels and needs for pain medicines are different. Pain levels also decrease as your surgical wound heals, so you may need to take less of your medicine as you recover.
But there are also risks
As mentioned above, side effects of opioids include constipation and feeling drowsy or nauseous. The drowsiness can also make you more likely to fall over.
Opioids prescribed to manage pain at home after surgery are usually prescribed for short-term use.
But up to one in ten Australians still take them up to four months after surgery. One study found people didn’t know how to safely stop taking opioids.
Such long-term opioid use may lead to dependence and overdose. It can also reduce the medicine’s effectiveness. That’s because your body becomes used to the opioid and needs more of it to have the same effect.
Dependency and side effects are also more common with slow-release opioids than immediate-release opioids. This is because people are usually on slow-release opioids for longer.
Then there are concerns about “leftover” opioids. One study found 40% of participants were prescribed more than twice the amount they needed.
This results in unused opioids at home, which can be dangerous to the person and their family. Storing leftover opioids at home increases the risk of taking too much, sharing with others inappropriately, and using without doctor supervision.
Don’t stockpile your leftover opioids in your medicine cupboard. Take them to your pharmacy for safe disposal. Archer Photo/Shutterstock How to mimimise the risks
Before using opioids, speak to your doctor or pharmacist about using over-the-counter pain medicines such as paracetamol or anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen (for example, Nurofen, Brufen) or diclofenac (for example, Voltaren, Fenac).
These can be quite effective at controlling pain and will lessen your need for opioids. They can often be used instead of opioids, but in some cases a combination of both is needed.
Other techniques to manage pain include physiotherapy, exercise, heat packs or ice packs. Speak to your doctor or pharmacist to discuss which techniques would benefit you the most.
However, if you do need opioids, there are some ways to make sure you use them safely and effectively:
- ask for immediate-release rather than slow-release opioids to lower your risk of side effects
- do not drink alcohol or take sleeping tablets while on opioids. This can increase any drowsiness, and lead to reduced alertness and slower breathing
- as you may be at higher risk of falls, remove trip hazards from your home and make sure you can safely get up off the sofa or bed and to the bathroom or kitchen
- before starting opioids, have a plan in place with your doctor or pharmacist about how and when to stop taking them. Opioids after surgery are ideally taken at the lowest possible dose for the shortest length of time.
A heat pack may help with pain relief, so you end up using fewer painkillers. New Africa/Shutterstock If you’re concerned about side effects
If you are concerned about side effects while taking opioids, speak to your pharmacist or doctor. Side effects include:
- constipation – your pharmacist will be able to give you lifestyle advice and recommend laxatives
- drowsiness – do not drive or operate heavy machinery. If you’re trying to stay awake during the day, but keep falling asleep, your dose may be too high and you should contact your doctor
- weakness and slowed breathing – this may be a sign of a more serious side effect such as respiratory depression which requires medical attention. Contact your doctor immediately.
If you’re having trouble stopping opioids
Talk to your doctor or pharmacist if you’re having trouble stopping opioids. They can give you alternatives to manage the pain and provide advice on gradually lowering your dose.
You may experience withdrawal effects, such as agitation, anxiety and insomnia, but your doctor and pharmacist can help you manage these.
How about leftover opioids?
After you have finished using opioids, take any leftovers to your local pharmacy to dispose of them safely, free of charge.
Do not share opioids with others and keep them away from others in the house who do not need them, as opioids can cause unintended harms if not used under the supervision of a medical professional. This could include accidental ingestion by children.
For more information, speak to your pharmacist or doctor. Choosing Wisely Australia also has free online information about managing pain and opioid medicines.
Katelyn Jauregui, PhD Candidate and Clinical Pharmacist, School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney; Asad Patanwala, Professor, Sydney School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney; Jonathan Penm, Senior lecturer, School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney, and Shania Liu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
