5 ms·

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

• Foobar8568 8y ago
  How is that different from "eastern lifestyle?" or any lifestyle where one has to work to death to survive?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• wenc 8y ago
  Sounds more like the American lifestyle rather than Western lifestyle. It doesn’t fit the description of most Western and Southern Europeans.
  • lentil_soup 8y ago
    don't know about exercise or salt intake, but in general, Europeans drink more than Americans http://www.who.int/gho/alcohol/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/alcohol/en/
    • wenc 8y ago
      I think there’s a difference between drinking and drunkenness. Southern Europeans tend to imbibe at meal times so their overall intake might be higher. However they don’t have a culture of getting smashed on the weekends. Northern Europeans do however so in the aggregate it may all just wash out. There’s generally a lot more physical activity in Europe because public transit is good and vehicle ownership is expensive and inconvenient. Their salt intake is probably similar. But the link between salt and hypertension may not be as strong as once thought, especially among individuals with low salt sensitivity. I have mild hypertension myself that is correlated with weight rather than salt intake. But the main point is the given definition of a Western lifestyle isn’t descriptive of the lifestyles of a vast number of Westerners.
• mtgx 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
• lazyjones 8y ago
  Sounds like russian lifestyle too...