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Chronic, unrecognized anger and resentment reemerge in our life as depression, which is anger directed against oneself. If pushed further into the unconscious, it can re-emerge as psychosomatic illnesses. Migraine headaches, arthritis, and hypertension are frequently cited examples of chronic suppressed anger.
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David R. Hawkins (Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender)
“
The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
he noticed that patients in the worst health all seemed to breathe far too much. The more they breathed, the worse off they were, especially those with hypertension
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James Nestor (Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art)
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What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause? Buteyko wondered.
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James Nestor (Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art)
“
In fact, neglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, hypertension, or obesity.4
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Susan Pinker (The Village Effect: Why Face-to-face Contact Matters)
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Physical symptoms such as muscle tension, back problems, stomach distress, constipation, diarrhea, headaches, obesity or maybe even hypertension can be caused by suppressing your emotions. Suppressed anger may also cause you to overreact to people and situations or to act inappropriately. Unexpressed anger can cause you to become irritable, irrational, and prone to emotional outbursts and episodes of depression.
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Beverly Engel (The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself)
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If a man were to spend years of his life trying to discover the chemical constituency of salt water without bothering to find out what has already been said on the subject in any elementary chemistry book, we should say that he was making very imperfect use of the resources available to us. Similarly, can it not be said that people, worrying themselves sick over their individual frustrations, constantly suffering from petty irritations and hypertensions, are making extremely imperfect use of the available human resources of adjustment when they fail to strengthen and quiet themselves through contact with literature, music, painting, and the other arts?
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S.I. Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action)
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I told you, Apollo, the world has many crises. Just this morning, scientists released another study tying soda to hypertension. If they continue to disparage the name of Diet Coke, I will have to smite someone!” He stormed off to plot his revenge on the health industry.
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Rick Riordan (The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo, #5))
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Dionysus probably could have enlightened me, but he'd already checked us off his to-do list.
'I told you, Apollo, the world has many crises. Just this morning, scientists released another study tying soda to hypertension. If they continue to disparage the name of Diet Coke, I will have to smite someone!' He stormed off to plot his revenge on the health industry.
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Rick Riordan (The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo, #5))
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Summer of this year I will be releasing a 'diabetic friendly' cookbook, sharing recipes and tips that have helped me lose 140 pounds and beat diabetes and hypertension! The title 'Losing To Win' will be published by Creative Partners Publishing!
www.creativepartnerspublishing.com
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Randy Jernigan (This Thing Called Love: A Collection of Love Stories to Gladden the Heart and Warm the Soul)
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They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and found me she said down on my side chewing the rug in my room. My room’s shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again. On my side all red and wet.'
'A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI2828 will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I'd say you're pretty lucky to be here right now.’
'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.’
'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’
'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.
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Aubrey Gordon (What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat)
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Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was.
For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.
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Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
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I believe that human beings are designed to be physically active and that not doing so creates energy imbalances within the body that ultimately contribute to obesity and other health problems. As evidence, over 500,000 people die each year from diseases linked to physical inactivity and obesity. Furthermore, rates of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer have all tripled over the past 30 years corresponding to decreasing levels of daily physical activity and increasing rates of obesity.
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Nina Cherie Franklin
“
A modern fad which has gained widespread acceptance amongst the semi-educated who wish to appear secular is the practice of meditation. They proclaim with an air of smug superiority, ‘Main mandir-vandir nahin jaata, meditate karta hoon (I don’t go to temples or other such places, I meditate).’ The exercise involves sitting lotus-pose (padma asana), regulating one’s breathing and making your mind go blank to prevent it from ‘jumping about like monkeys’ from one (thought) branch to another. This intense concentration awakens the kundalini serpent coiled at the base of the spine. It travels upwards through chakras (circles) till it reaches its destination in the cranium. Then the kundalini is fully jaagrit (roused) and the person is assured to have reached his goal. What does meditation achieve? The usual answer is ‘peace of mind’. If you probe further, ‘and what does peace of mind achieve?’, you will get no answer because there is none. Peace of mind is a sterile concept which achieves nothing. The exercise may be justified as therapy for those with disturbed minds or those suffering from hypertension, but there is no evidence to prove that it enhances creativity. On the contrary it can be established by statistical data that all the great works of art, literature, science and music were works of highly agitated minds, at times minds on the verge of collapse. Allama Iqbal’s short prayer is pertinent: Khuda tujhey kisee toofaan say aashna kar dey Keh terey beher kee maujon mein iztiraab naheen (May God bring a storm in your life, There is no agitation in the waves of your life’s ocean.)
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Khushwant Singh (The End Of India)
“
How to explain hypertension to a woman with no more than a ladylike education?
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Emma Donoghue (The Pull of the Stars)
“
The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
“
Ryan and Jethá tell us (p. 206) about a study of the Waorani of Ecuador which showed that they were free of most diseases and had no evidence of health problems such as hypertension, heart disease, or cancer (Larrick et al.1979).What they don’t add is that Larrick and his colleagues found that 42% of all population losses were actually caused by Waorani killing other Waorani.
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Lynn Saxon (Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn)
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FACT 211: The chronic stress of a high-pressure job has been shown to double the risk of a heart attack. Chronic stress may also result in alcoholism, hypertension, and severe depression, and can make your joints ache, your hair fall out, and even stop your period.
So that bald drunk lady at work who's always crying and giving away her tampons? Give her a break; she's under a lot of stress.
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Cary McNeal (1,001 Facts that Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader)
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A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.
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Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
“
They understand the importance of diet in the prevention and treatment of many disease conditions such as diabetes, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease, and their advice can enhance your quality of life.
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Maye Musk (A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success)
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British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion darts-throwing in which all the participants looked like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse).
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Stephen King (It)
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I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice. Heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer’s disease, impotence and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented. These diseases, which generally occur with aging and tissue degeneration, kill the majority of us before our time.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
“
These epidemiological and experimental studies have provided evidence for a dietary pattern that is associated with reduced risk of developing cancer, atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and type II diabetes.
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David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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The pressure of suppressed feelings is later felt as irritability, mood swings, tension in the muscles of the neck and back, headaches, cramps, menstrual disorders, colitis, indigestion, insomnia, hypertension, allergies, and other somatic conditions.
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David R. Hawkins (Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender)
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The price tag of social change has come in the form of stress and stress-related physical disorders, such as heart attacks, strokes, and hypertension. We must now confront the possibility that mental illness has become part of the psychological price.
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Jerold J. Kreisman (I Hate You--Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality)
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Eating pork, eel and catfish while doing this meditation regularly may result in Kundalini syndrome. Pork oil or lard should definitely be avoided. Kundalini syndrome may manifest as: 1. Chronic fatigue (or chronic extreme general weakness) 2. Overheating of the body 3. Chronic insomnia 4. Depression 5. Skin rashes 6. Hypertension and others
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Choa Kok Sui (Pranic Psychotherapy)
“
We now know that selenium makes two vital enzymes, deficiency in which has been linked to hypertension, arthritis, anemia, some cancers, and even, possibly, reduced sperm counts. So, clearly it is a good idea to get some selenium inside you (it is found particularly in nuts, whole wheat bread, and fish), but at the same time if you take in too much you can irremediably poison your liver.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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After years of intense research, I could come to only one conclusion: People whose diets are high in animal protein have significantly higher rates of chronic diseases: hypertension, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and many, many others, including cataracts, diverticulitis, diverticulosis, inflammatory bowel disease, gall bladder disorders, gout, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney stones, and rheumatoid arthritis.
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Garth Davis (Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It)
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Although a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done, although a poem is a last attempt at order when one can't stand the disorder any longer,
although poets are most needed when freedom, vitamin C, communications, laws and hypertension therapy are also most needed,
although to be an artist is to fail and art is fidelity to failure, as Samuel Beckett says,
a poem is not one of the last but of the first things of man.
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Miroslav Holub (Although)
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This includes drugs, alcohol, environmental toxins, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, sleep apnea, depression, negative thinking patterns, excessive stress, and a lack of exercise or new learning. 3. Consistently do good behaviors that help your brain. Adopt a great diet, learn new things, exercise, develop accurate thinking habits, work on stress management, and take some simple supplements to nourish your brain.
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Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
“
Reacher squinted through the glare. They were all looking at him. The sandy guy, Poulton. The woman, Lamarr. The hypertensive, Blake. All three of them from Serial Crimes down in Quantico. Up here to talk to him. Then Deerfield, the New York Bureau chief, a heavyweight. Then the lean guy, Cozo, from Organized Crime, working on the protection rackets. He glanced slowly left to right, and right to left, and finished up back on Deerfield. Then he nodded.
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Lee Child (Running Blind (Jack Reacher, #4))
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When the American Dietetic Association (ADA) surveyed all the studies on food and health, they concluded not just that a vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy as one that includes meat, but that “vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.
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Kathy Freston (Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World)
“
The circle of salt’s potential victims grew at an alarming rate. Part of Dahl’s research into the evils of salt involved breeding a strain of salt-sensitive rats, in which he induced hypertension by feeding them commercially prepared baby food that contained added sodium. In April 1970, newspapers ran an Associated Press report about Dahl’s findings under scary headlines like “Baby Food Salt May Be Harmful, Researcher Says.” The report quoted Dahl calling salted baby food “a needless kind of risk.
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Alan Levinovitz (The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat)
“
- Tu crois ça ? Alors, pour toi, les choses sont simples : il y a les bons et les méchants ? Quelle chance tu as ! Tiens, si tu avais le choix au moment des élections entre trois candidats : le premier à moitié paralysé par la polio, souffrant d'hypertension, d'anémie et de nombreuses pathologies lourdes, menteur à l'occasion, consultant une astrologue, trompant sa femme, fumant des cigarettes à la chaîne et buvant trop de martinis ; le deuxième obèse, ayant déjà perdu trois élections, fait une dépression et deux crises cardiaques, fumant des cigares et s'imbibant le soir au champagne, au porto, au cognac et au whisky avant de prendre deux somnifères ; le troisième enfin un héros de guerre décoré, respectant les femmes, aimant les animaux, ne buvant qu'une bière de temps en temps et ne fumant pas, lequel choisirais-tu ?
Servaz sourit.
- Je suppose que vous vous attendez à ce que je réponde le troisième ?
- Eh bien bravo, tu viens de rejeter Roosevelt et Churchill et d'élire Adolf Hitler. Tu vois : les choses ne sont jamais ce qu'elles paraissent.
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Bernard Minier
“
The path to health, for an individual or a society, must begin by taking pain into account. Instead, we silence pain when we should be straining our ears to hear it; we eat too fast and too much and take a seltzer; we work too long and too hard and take a tranquilizer. The three best selling drugs in the United States are a hypertension drug, a medication for ulcers, and a tranquilizer. These pain-mufflers are readily available because even the medical profession seems to look upon pain as the illness rather than the symptom.
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Paul W. Brand
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But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity.
Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue.
‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.
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Colin Wilson (New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow & the Post-Freudian Revolution)
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Doctors call conditions like bad blood pressure or hypertension “invisible killers.” Not thinking will, without careful attention, kill you, or it will kill your brain and you will become—to use the medical term—“stupid.” We say stupid things, we are angered for stupid reasons, we talk stupid, vote stupid, eat stupid, hate stupid, and don’t have the slightest idea how to love ourselves or someone else. We aim our rifle at the wrong guy on the wrong battlefield. We vote to enrich those who are already billionaires, somehow thinking we are not punishing ourselves.
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Richard Dreyfuss (One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know)
“
a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School set out on a thirty-year study to find out if a single related cause existed for mental illness, hypertension, malignant tumors, coronary heart disease, and suicide. After studying 1,377 people over a thirty-year period, the single common denominator was not diet or exercise. Not at all. They found instead that the most significant predictor of these five calamities was a lack of closeness to the parents, especially the father.7 Why? Stress! When a child grows up in a loving, intimate home, particularly with a father, the child is better capable of handling stress in life.
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Tim Clinton (God Attachment: Why You Believe, Act, and Feel the Way You Do About God)
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Anti-Dark colorism follows the logic of behavioral racism, linking behavior to color, studies show. White children attribute positivity to lighter skin and negativity to Dark skin, a colorism that grows stronger as they get older. White people usually favor lighter-skinned politicians over darker-skinned ones. Dark African Americans are disproportionately at risk of hypertension. Dark African American students receive significantly lower GPAs than Light students. Maybe because racist Americans have higher expectations for Light students, people tend to remember educated Black men as Light-skinned even when their skin is Dark.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
“
The researchers tried a clever tactic to overcome this problem. They created a number of recipes for common foods including muffins and pasta in which they could disguise placebo ingredients like bran and molasses to match the texture and color of the flax-laden foods. This way, they could randomize people into two groups and secretly introduce tablespoons of daily ground flaxseeds into the diets of half the participants to see if it made any difference. After six months, those who ate the placebo foods started out hypertensive and stayed hypertensive, despite the fact that many of them were on a variety of blood pressure pills. On average, they started the study at 155/81 and ended it at 158/81. What about the hypertensives who were unknowingly eating flaxseeds every day? Their blood pressure dropped from 158/82 down to 143/75. A seven-point drop in diastolic blood pressure may not sound like a lot, but that would be expected to result in 46 percent fewer strokes and 29 percent less heart disease over time.125 How does that result compare with taking drugs? The flaxseeds managed to drop subjects’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure by up to fifteen and seven points, respectively. Compare that result to the effect of powerful antihypertensive drugs, such as calcium-channel blockers (for example, Norvasc, Cardizem, Procardia), which have been found to reduce blood pressure by only eight and three points, respectively, or to ACE inhibitors (such as Vasotec, Lotensin, Zestril, Altace), which drop patients’ blood pressure by only five and two points, respectively.126 Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects. In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.127 Hibiscus Tea for Hypertension Hibiscus tea, derived from the flower of the same name, is also known as roselle, sorrel, jamaica, or sour tea. With
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
“
ME/CFS has a greater negative impact on functional status and well-being than other chronic diseases, e.g., cancer or lung diseases[8], and is associated with a drastic decrement in physical functioning[9]. In a comparison study[10] ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower than patients with hypertension, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and multiple sclerosis (MS), on all of the eight Short Form Health Survey (SF-36)[11] subscales. As compared to patients with depression, ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower on all the scales, except for scales measuring mental health and role disability due to emotional problems, on which they scored significantly higher.
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Frank Twisk
“
Arteriosclerosis, removing people from active life when the period of maximum fertility has passed, is of benefit to the young if it relieves them of the care of parents, or brings them an inheritance as they enter adult life. . . . Any attempts to eradicate such a disease from the urban population will be frustrated by natural selection and the survival of more grandchildren in families with few grandparents. Those best fitted to survive in a world growing more urban are those who cease to require support as soon as their roles as parents have been completed. Atherosclerosis and hypertension are now the chief factors in determining that we do not overstay our allotted span of life too long.
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Thomas H. Lee (Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine)
“
Some studies have shown that hypertension occurs less frequently among vegetarians than among nonvegetarians, regardless of body weight or sodium intake. Intake of red meat has been linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer. Vegetarians, including lacto-ovo and vegan, have reduced incidences of diabetes and lower rates of cancer than nonvegetarians, particularly for gastrointestinal cancer.47,48
Vegetarian-style diet patterns are associated with lower all-cause mortality.49 Vegetarian-style eating patterns are being used for the prevention and therapeutic dietary treatment of numerous chronic conditions, including overweight and obesity, cardiovascular disease (hyperlipidemia, ischemic heart disease, and hypertension), diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis.50
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Melissa Bernstein
“
And the cost of those injuries? Fatal disease in epidemic proportions. “Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history,” Dr. Lieberman said. “If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.” Magic bullet? The last time a scientist with Dr. Lieberman’s credentials used that term, he’d just created penicillin. Dr. Lieberman knew it, and meant it. If running shoes never existed, he was saying, more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world. That’s a staggering amount of guilt to lay at Nike’s feet. But the most remarkable part? Nike already knew it. In
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Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
“
Some people live longer than they ought to by any known measures. As Jo Marchant notes in her book Cure, Costa Ricans have only about one-fifth the personal wealth of Americans, and have poorer health care, but live longer. Moreover, people in one of the poorest regions of Costa Rica, the Nicoya Peninsula, live longest of all, even though they have much higher rates of obesity and hypertension. They also have longer telomeres. The theory is that they benefit from closer social bonds and family relationships. Curiously, it was found that if they live alone or don’t see a child at least once a week, the telomere length advantage vanishes. It is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA. Conversely, a 2010 U.S. study found, not having such relationships doubles your risk of dying from any cause.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
The Genetics of Asthma lab is one of countless research projects at universities and biotech firms around the country hunting for the genes that are responsible for health disparities in America. They are supplementing a large body of published studies that claim to show that racial gaps in disease prevalence or mortality are caused by genetic differences. In addition to asthma, disparities in infant mortality, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension have all been attributed in the scientific literature to genetic vulnerability that varies according to race. Most of these studies never even examined the genotypes of research subjects, as Burchard’s lab does; they just infer a genetic source of racial differences when they fail to find another explanation. As interest in health disparities converges with the genomic science of race, a new brand of racial stereotyping is gaining hold in biomedical research.
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Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
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Specifically, participants were asked to describe their relationship with each parent using the following scale: “very close,” “warm and friendly,” “tolerant,” or “strained and cold.” Ninety-one percent of participants who stated that their relationship with their mother was tolerant or strained were diagnosed with a significant health issue (such as cancer, coronary artery disease, hypertension, etc.) in midlife, compared with 45 percent of participants—less than half—who reported that their relationship with their mothers was warm or close. Similar numbers were reported for participants who described their relationship with their fathers. Eighty-two percent of the participants who reported tolerant or strained relationships with their fathers had significant health issues in midlife, compared with 50 percent of those who had warm or close relationships with their fathers. If participants had a strained relationship with both parents, the results were startling: 100 percent had significant health issues, versus 47 percent of those who described their relationships with their parents as being warm and close.1
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Mark Wolynn (It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle)
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Now, although hypertension is accentuated by modern civilisation, it is not specifically a disease of civilisation. It is a disease of consciousness—that is, of being human. The farm labourer going to work is as likely to ignore his surroundings as the harassed car salesman. And if the inhabitants of some Amazon village are ‘closer to nature’ than New Yorkers, this is usually at the cost of dirt and ignorance and inconvenience. Hypertension is the price we pay for the symphonies of Beethoven, the novels of Balzac, the advances in medical knowledge that prevent children dying of smallpox. However, it is not a necessary and inescapable price. It is the result of ignorance, of bad management of our vital economy. The point to observe here is that although hypertension may not be necessary, it is as widespread as the common cold. It would not be inaccurate to say that all human beings live in a state of ‘vigilance’ and anxiety that is far above the level they actually need for vital efficiency. It is a general tendency of consciousness to ‘spread the attention too thinly’; and, like an over-excited child with too many toys on Christmas Day, the result is nervous exhaustion.
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Colin Wilson (The Occult)
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Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents.70 They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections, diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, or from violence and accidents.71 Health surveys also indicate that most of the noninfectious diseases that kill or disable older people in developed nations are rare or unknown among middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers.72 These admittedly limited studies have found that hunter-gatherers rarely if ever get type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, breast cancer, asthma, and liver disease. They also don’t appear to suffer much from gout, myopia, cavities, hearing loss, collapsed arches, and other common ailments. To be sure, hunter-gatherers don’t live in perpetually perfect health, especially since tobacco and alcohol have become increasingly available to them, but the evidence suggests that they are healthy compared to many older Americans today despite never having received any medical care. In short, if you were to compare contemporary health data from people around the world with equivalent data from hunter-gatherers, you would not conclude that rising rates of common mismatch diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes are straightforward, inevitable by-products of economic progress and increased longevity. Moreover,
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Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
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The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
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In addition to the conditions it already affects, free radical damage is now being linked to hypertension, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure, and irritable bowel disease.
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Steven Lamm (The Hardness Factor: How to Achieve Your Best Health and Sexual Fitness at Any Age)
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When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases either originated in domesticated animals or depend upon high-density population for easy transmission. The deadliest infectious diseases and parasites that have plagued our species could not have spread until after the transition to agriculture.
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Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
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We also avoid hydrogenated fats, or trans fats, a common ingredient in processed foods, especially grain-based foods, as they contribute to heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. Margarine is the worst, made with vegetable oils hydrogenated to yield a solid stick or tub form. Many processed foods, from cookies to sandwich spreads, contain hydrogenated oils and should be avoided for this and other reasons. Use real organic butter or ghee instead (if you include dairy).
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William Davis (Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox: Reprogram Your Body for Rapid Weight Loss and Amazing Health)
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it is well documented that obese people with hypertension live significantly longer than thinner people with hypertension291292293294 and have a lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or early death.295
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Linda Bacon (Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight)
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Social interaction makes us live longer, healthier lives. By a lot. Pinker writes, “In fact, neglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, hypertension, or obesity.
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Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: Reese's Book Club: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
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A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine set out on a thirty-year study to find if a single related cause existed for five major issues: mental illness, hypertension, malignant tumors, coronary heart disease, and suicide. After studying 1,377 students over thirty years, the most prevalent single cause of all five illnesses was not what you may think. Diet? Exercise? Not at all. They found instead that the most significant predictor of these five tragedies was a lack of closeness to the parents, especially the father.24
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Joshua Straub (Safe House: How Emotional Safety Is the Key to Raising Kids Who Live, Love, and Lead Well)
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Allowing the momentary hijacking of our sense of self by random acts of fear or hate—call it guerrilla racism—is bad for us. Literally. The high rates of hypertension, stroke, and heart disease among African-American males bear brutal witness to the problem. Do not volunteer yourself as a casualty. Let those with the illness, those who caricature and misrepresent you, be the ones consumed.
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Bruce A. Jacobs (Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans)
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The separation of mind and body that informs medical practice is also the dominant ideology in our culture. We do not often think of socio-economic structures and practices as determinants of illness or well-being. They are not usually “part of the equation.” Yet the scientific data is beyond dispute:
socio-economic relationships have a profound influence on health. For example, although the media and the medical profession — inspired by pharmaceutical research — tirelessly promote the idea that next to hypertension and smoking, high cholesterol poses the greatest risk for heart disease, the evidence is that job strain is more important than all the other risk factors combined.
Further, stress in general and job strain in particular are significant contributors both to high blood pressure and to elevated cholesterol levels. Economic relationships influence health because, most obviously, people with higher incomes are better able to afford healthier diets, living and working conditions and stress-reducing pursuits.
Dennis Raphael, associate professor at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto has recently published a study of the societal influences on heart disease in Canada and elsewhere. His conclusion: “One of the most important life conditions that determine whether individuals stay healthy or become ill is their income. In addition, the overall health of North American society may be more determined by the distribution of income among its members rather than the overall wealth of the society…. Many studies find that socioeconomic circumstances, rather than medical and lifestyle risk factors, are the main causes of cardiovascular disease, and that conditions during early life are especially important.”
The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health. This principle was demonstrated in the British Whitehall study showing that second-tier civil servants were at greater risk for heart disease than their superiors, despite nearly comparable incomes.
Recognizing the multigenerational template for behaviour and for illness, and recognizing, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility, a matter to be taken up when we come in the final chapters to consider healing.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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Cancer and the autoimmune diseases of various sorts are, by and large, diseases of civilization. While industrialized society organized along the capitalist model has solved many problems for many of its members — such as housing, food supply and sanitation — it has also created numerous new pressures even for those who do not need to struggle for the basics of existence. We have come to take these stresses for granted as inevitable consequences of human life, as if human life existed in an abstract form separable from the human beings who live it.
When we look at people who only recently have come to experience urban civilization, we can see more clearly that the benefits of “progress” exact hidden costs in terms of physiological balance, to say nothing of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. Hans Selye wrote, “Apparently in a Zulu population, the stress of urbanization increased the incidence of hypertension, predisposing people to heart accidents. In Bedouins and other nomadic Arabs, ulcerative colitis has been noted after settlement in Kuwait City, presumably as a consequence of urbanization.”
The main effect of recent trends on the family under the prevailing socioeconomic system, accelerated by the current drive to “globalization,” has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults than ever before during the course of human evolution. The nexus previously based in extended family, village, community and neighbourhood has been replaced by institutions such as daycare and school, where children are more oriented to their peers than to reliable parents or parent substitutes.
Even the nuclear family, supposedly the basic unit of the social structure, is under intolerable pressure. In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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There is convincing evidence that vegetarians have lower rates of coronary heart disease, largely explained by low LDL cholesterol, probable lower rales of hypertension and diabetes mellitus, and lower prevalence of obesity. Overall, their cancer rates appear to be moderately lower than others living in the same communities, and life expectancy appears to be greater.
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Gary E. Fraser
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Someone who is under constant stress “forgets” that he or she is tense due to habituation and no longer notices it consciously, even though everyone else might see it plain as day. The tension may only become noticeable after it causes physical problems like muscular tension, insomnia, or hypertension—or when emotional and behavioral problems arise, like losing one’s temper. Sometimes the tension becomes noticeable
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Julie T. Lusk (Yoga Nidra for Complete Relaxation and Stress Relief)
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Several previous researches reported that stroke incidence is greater among participants with a higher consumption of red and processed meats because they tend to have unhealthy behaviors and conditions.15, 24, 25 Although studies included in this meta‐analysis adjusted for major stroke risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, smoking, obesity, and alcohol use, the effect of unadjusted risk factors still remain.
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Kyuwoong Kim
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a 2014 meta-analysis (a compilation of many similar studies) showing that vegetarian diets may be particularly good at lowering blood pressure.110 And the more plants, perhaps, the better. Meat-free diets in general “confer protection against cardiovascular diseases . . . some cancers and total mortality,” but completely plant-based diets “seem to offer additional protection for obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular mortality.”111
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Michael Greger (How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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Non-meat eaters, especially vegans, have a lower prevalence of hypertension and lower systolic and diastolic blood pressures than meat eaters, largely because of differences in body mass index.
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Paul Appleby
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Of course, pregnant women are no less in need of safe, effective medical treatments than anyone else. Each year, over 400,000 women in the United States battle significant illnesses while pregnant. And many women have chronic conditions, from hypertension to autoimmune diseases to depression, that they must manage with medications. As bioethicist Francoise Baylis wrote in a 2010 Nature article, 'Pregnant women get sick, and sick women get pregnant.' Indeed, 90 percent of women take some medication during pregnancy, and about 70 percent take a prescription drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The average woman receives 1.3 prescriptions per obstetric visit, and nearly two-thirds of women use four to five medications during pregnancy and labor.
But with little actual research to go on, doctors are simply guessing at how drugs will affect a pregnant body, and their best predictions can be disastrously off.
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Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
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Prayer, too, offers many of the same health and stress-relief benefits as meditation. Physicians Larry Dossey (Healing Words), Dale Matthews (The Faith Factor), and others have written books outlining the scientific evidence of the medical benefits of prayer and other meditative states. Some of these benefits include reduced feelings of stress, lower cholesterol levels, improved sleep, reduced anxiety and depression, fewer headaches, more relaxed muscles, and longer life spans. People who pray or read the Bible every day are 40 percent less likely to suffer from hypertension than others.
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Daniel G. Amen (Change Your Brain, Change Your Body: Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted)
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》Insidious《
"Why are you so cold hearted", she asks.
Words of wise say 'There is a pagoda inside every human being'. I want to see. She drops a destination pin twisted at end. In his silence, she sinks into abyss inside him, travelling canyons, caverns and reaches a red dead barren land like amidst of kangaroo country. The only things one see here are Zigzag paths created by Horned vipers, young barrel cactus and corpus of human emotions.
"Come under the shelter of this Uluru hill", a thunderous voice she hears. This is blood which trickles like sand in hour glass. The lightning in anonymity is the veins where it flows. That dark clot moving towards mind is sudden anger, spreading in entire body and generates uncontrolled hypertension. Deceit, dishonesty, falsity and hypocrisy of travellers from ages has evolved this place.
"But.. but where is that heart soft as fairyfloss? Let me go inside that rock" she urges.
You don't need to go there. Purify your heart as of a child in cradle. You will inhale the fumes of fragrance approaching you like incense stick. Then again visit and observe this place, no less than Garden of Eden.
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Satbir Singh Noor
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It’s possible that obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and the other associated diseases of civilization all have independent causes, as the conventional wisdom suggests, but that they serve as risk factors for each other, because once we get one of these diseases we become more susceptible to the others.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Shkreli’s money-making strategy was to forget about investing in new medicines, and instead to buy existing ones on the cheap, hike their prices and restrict their supply. Turing started out with three drugs – ketamine for depression, oxytocin to induce labour and a ganglionic blocker for hypertension – all acquired from Retrophin. On 10 August 2015, Turing bought Daraprim for $55 million. The very next day, it executed the 5,500% price increase.
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Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
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a man’s lack of closeness to his parents, or having a father who was physically and emotionally less involved, could predict early disability and death from suicide, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and tumors.
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Christiane Northrup (Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing)
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an all-nighter or increasing heart rates to accomplish a strenuous physical challenge—they also strain the immune system. That’s why students get sick after finals week or athletes get so sore after big games. If those cortisol levels remain high over a prolonged period, as has been found in African Americans, the strain makes people more susceptible to sickness. These discoveries called into question the thinking that bad diets and a lack of exercise caused African Americans to have higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. It turned out that the stress of everything, from everyday slights to fears of a deadly interaction with the police, was altering human physiology.
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Robert Samuels (His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice)
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High blood pressure is bad. It increases the risk of death. Atenolol lowers blood pressure, but it does not lower the risk of death. The evidence supporting the claim that hypertension increases your risk of death is very different from the evidence proving that using atenolol to decrease your blood pressure lowers your risk of death.
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Vinayak K. Prasad (Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives)
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and are willing to put in the effort. Martine decided to become an expert in pulmonary hypertension.
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Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
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William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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Ginger Tangle had nothing against nature. She often stopped to notice the sky, clouds particularly, but also hawks circling and the dissipating puffy trails of planes. But today was different. Today, in the parking lot at the summit of Mount Washington, as she gazed at the granite ledges perched over sheer drops only inches from where her disgruntled teenage daughter stood, what she felt was hypertension. She could hear it, her heartbeat pulsing in her ears.
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Nancy Star (Sisters One, Two, Three)
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As we age, daily hours of minimal physical activity—typically in chairs—render us more vulnerable to a litany of chronic illnesses and disabilities that used to be rare or unknown such as heart disease, hypertension, many cancers, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and Alzheimer’s. It is commonly assumed that these conditions are the inevitable by-products of more of us living to be older. But this is not entirely true. Exercise may not be an elixir, but by stimulating growth, maintenance, and repair, it can reduce our susceptibility to many of these mismatches. In this sense, exercise is medicinal. And unlike other medicines, exercise is free, has no side effects, and is sometimes fun. So to stay healthy and fit, many of us exercise.
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Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
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Arrhythmias are additional common causes of problems and death, and the heart can also be damaged by infections, birth defects, drugs, and faulty wiring. But atherosclerosis is by far the leading culprit, and chronically high blood pressure, hypertension, is a close second. Hypertension is a silent condition that relentlessly strains the heart, arteries, and various organs. At least 100,000 times a day, the heart forces about five liters of blood through thousands of miles of arteries that resist each squeeze, generating pressure. When we exercise, blood pressure rises temporarily, causing the heart’s muscular chambers to adapt, mostly by becoming stronger, larger, and more elastic so it can pump more blood with each stroke.30 Just as important, arteries also adapt to exercise to keep blood pressure low, primarily by expanding, multiplying, and staying elastic.31 However, when blood pressure is chronically high, the heart defends itself by developing thicker muscular walls. These thicker walls stiffen and fill with scar tissue, and eventually the heart weakens. A vicious cycle then ensues. As the heart’s ability to pump blood declines, it becomes harder to exercise and thus control high blood pressure. Blood pressure may rise as the heart progressively weakens until the failing heart cannot support or sustain a normal blood pressure. Death usually ensues. Coronary artery disease is ancient and has even been diagnosed in mummies.32 But research on nonindustrial populations provides powerful evidence that coronary artery disease and hypertension are largely evolutionary mismatches. Although many medical textbooks teach doctors that it’s normal for blood pressure to rise with age, we have known since the 1970s this is not true among hunter-gatherer populations like the San and the Hadza.33 The average blood pressure in a seventy-year-old San hunter-gatherer is 120/67, no different from a twenty-year-old. Lifelong low blood pressure also characterizes many subsistence farming populations. My colleagues Rob Shave and Aaron Baggish and I measured more than a hundred Tarahumara farmers of every age and found no difference in blood pressure between teenagers and octogenarians.34 By the same token, blood pressure can also stay normal into old age among industrialized people who eat sensibly and stay active.35
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Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
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Magnesium is the natural element your body uses to prevent excess calcium from entering these cells and to maintain normal blood pressure. Magnesium is indeed our natural calcium blocker. Dr. Sherry Rogers, a leading proponent of integrative medicine, has written extensively about magnesium’s benefits for disorders caused by abnormal muscle constriction. “In order for a muscle to contract, it needs calcium. In order to relax it needs magnesium.”11 Hypertension is one of the conditions for which Dr. Rogers uses magnesium. Magnesium is also necessary for the health of the endothelium, the tiny cells that form the thin inner lining of the blood vessels. Endothelial cells play an active role in prompting the smooth muscle cells to constrict or relax by producing substances such as prostacycline, thromboxane, and endothelin. Magnesium increases the endothelium’s production of prostacycline, which induces artery relaxation, and it inhibits the production of thromboxane and endothelin, which promotes artery constriction.12 Magnesium also directly influences the ability of cells to use potassium, which also induces artery relaxation. Dr. Mildred Seelig, one of the first pioneers of magnesium research, states, “Low potassium, by itself, can bring on high blood pressure. But even adequate potassium intake cannot normalize high blood pressure if magnesium is too low. Without enough magnesium (and potassium) in our bodies, we cannot expect normal blood pressure.”13 THE PROBLEM WITH THE STANDARD MEDICAL TREATMENT OF HYPERTENSION With the exception of the common cold, hypertension accounts for more visits to doctors in the United States than any other condition. Most often, the treatment recommended is some type of prescription drug. Sometimes these drugs are necessary, and there is no doubt their ability to lower blood pressure can prevent many of the severe complications of hypertension.
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Jay S. Cohen (The Magnesium Solution for High Blood Pressure: How to Use Magnesium to Help Prevent & Relieve Hypertension Naturally (The Square One Health Guides))
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We do know that blood pressure is controlled by the tiny smooth muscles lining the interior of blood vessels and the nerves that control them. These muscles’ ability to dilate or constrict governs the pressure and blood flow to each organ and tissue, thus allowing the body to adapt to various states such as sleep, digestion, or exercise, as well as to external circumstances such as a hot or cold environment. When the muscles throughout the vascular system dilate, blood pressure drops. When the muscles constrict, blood pressure rises. If this constriction occurs continuously, the blood pressure remains abnormally high. This is hypertension. What influences the relaxing and tightening of the tiny smooth muscles lining the blood vessels? Many factors, but among the foremost is the mineral magnesium. Actually, the balance of magnesium and another mineral, calcium, in and around the muscle cells lining the arteries is a primary determinant of their state of relaxation and constriction. Calcium tends to make muscles constrict, whereas magnesium causes them to relax.
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Jay S. Cohen (The Magnesium Solution for High Blood Pressure: How to Use Magnesium to Help Prevent & Relieve Hypertension Naturally (The Square One Health Guides))
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When Richard Cooper went to medical school at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, he was stunned at how many of his black patients were suffering from high blood pressure. He would encounter people in their forties and fifties felled by strokes that left them institutionalized. When Cooper did some research on the problem, he learned that American doctors had first noted the high rate of hypertension in American blacks decades earlier. Cardiologists concluded it must be the result of genetic differences between blacks and whites. Paul Dudley White, the preeminent American cardiologist of the early 1900s, called it a “racial predisposition,” speculating that the relatives of American blacks in West Africa must suffer from high blood pressure as well. Cooper went on to become a cardiologist himself, conducting a series of epidemiological studies on heart disease. In the 1990s, he finally got the opportunity to put the racial predisposition hypothesis to the test. Collaborating with an international network of doctors, Cooper measured the blood pressure of eleven thousand people. Paul Dudley White, it turned out, was wrong. Farmers in rural Nigeria and Cameroon actually had substantially lower blood pressure than American blacks, Cooper found. In fact, they had lower blood pressure than white Americans, too. Most surprisingly of all, Cooper found that people in Finland, Germany, and Spain had higher blood pressure than American blacks. Cooper’s findings don’t challenge the fact that genetic variants can increase people’s risk of developing high blood pressure. In fact, Cooper himself has helped run studies that have revealed some variants in African Americans and Nigerians that can raise that risk. But this genetic inheritance does not, on its own, explain the experiences of African and European Americans. To understand their differences, doctors need to examine the experiences of blacks and whites in the United States—the stress of life in high-crime neighborhoods and the difficulty of getting good health care, for example. These are powerful inheritances, too, but they’re not inscribed in DNA. For scientists carrying out the hard work of disentangling these influences, an outmoded biological concept of race offers no help. In the words of the geneticists Noah Rosenberg and Michael Edge, it has become “a sideshow and a distraction.
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Carl Zimmer (She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become)
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Spending too much time seated at work or at home not only reduces muscular and respiratory fitness but also increases appetite and curbs the desire to participate in activities. Being sedentary can lead to hypertension, imbalanced eating, cardiovascular disease,
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Héctor García (Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life)
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If there is no fight or flight, but rather freeze, and the situation chronically continues, the mindbody faces the likelihood of both physiological and psychological consequences as it struggles to maintain homeostasis. These consequences are [...] “diseases of adaptation.” Physical effects include stomach/intestinal disorders, headaches, hypertension, back pain, muscle aches, etc. The psychological effects resulting from resistance include resentment, depression and anger.
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Steven Ray Ozanich (The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice Is Making Us Worse)
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Pregnancy is not something to take lightly,” he continued. “My mother suffered through two pregnancies, and nobody took care of her. Not even the doctors she went to. They told her that it was normal, that gestational hypertension and diabetes are something that many pregnant women experience, and that she was just being dramatic.
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Lydia V. Simms (Solana)
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In addition to easing stress, and promoting relaxation, sauna bathing can improve sleep, skin conditions, and circulation; lower blood pressure, which can prevent or even treat hypertension; improve lung function and reduce pulmonary diseases; reduce pain and increase mobility for patients with rheumatic disease; provide relief for headaches and arthritis; and boost the immune system, making people less susceptible to colds and viruses.
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Kari Leibowitz (How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days)
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Diabetes – the physical costs Hypertension: 70% of diabetics also require medication for blood pressure. Cholesterol: 65% of diabetics require medication to reduce their cholesterol. Heart attacks: Diabetics, even when on full medication, are twice as likely to be hospitalised, crippled or die from a heart attack. Strokes: Diabetics are 1.5 times more likely to suffer a debilitating stroke. Blindness and Eye Problems: Diabetes is the number one cause of preventable blindness in the developed world. Impotence: Diabetes is also the number one cause of impotence. Dementia: Having diabetes doubles your risk of dementia. Kidney disease: Diabetes is the cause of kidney failure in half of all new cases; most people on dialysis are diabetics. Amputations: There are over 7000 diabetes-related amputations done every year in the UK and over 73,000 in the US.
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Michael Mosley (The 8-week Blood Sugar Diet: Lose Weight Fast and Reprogramme your Body)
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Some researchers consider lack of exercise to be a greater risk factor for decreased life expectancy than the combined risks posed by cigarette smoking, obesity, hypertension, and high cholesterol.
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Rich Snyder DO (In Balance for Life: Understanding and Maximizing Your Body's pH Factor)
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Essential hypertension, i.e. high blood pressure without known cause, is hyperinsulin, type 2 diabetes until proven otherwise by oral glucose tolerance with insulin assays.
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Joseph R. Kraft (Diabetes Epidemic & You)
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Studies have actually shown that there is a very close positive relationship between insulin resistance and hypertension. Actually, diabetics who suffer from hypertension have double the risk of suffering from cardiovascular heart disease.
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Janie Sanders (DIABETES:The Top 60 Foods For A Diabetic Living To Eat To Control Your Blood Sugar And Reverse Diabetes (Diabetes,blood sugar solution,Diabetic living,Diabetic ... Diet,smart blood sugar,sugar detox))
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gave rise to a selection process in which the survivors were predominantly those with greater capacity to retain sodium in their system, while those with lower capacity perished. The selection mechanism was dehydration. Wilson and Grim hold that the black populations that grew out of the slave imports came to be dominated, through genetic inheritance, by people with extra capacity to retain salt in their system. And this, they conclude, is the main factor that explains the phenomenon in question. This explanation is disputed by other medical scientists. The conflicting views of the contending scientists were summarized recently by Daniel Goleman (1990). According to Goleman, Elijah Saunders, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical School and coauthor of a leading textbook on the subject, Hypertension in Blacks, holds that anger against racism is the principal cause of hypertension among blacks in the United States. Shirley Brown of the University
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Joseph E. Inikori (The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe)
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Heart attack is a window on the effects of class on health. The risk factors—smoking, poor diet, inactivity, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and stress—are all more common among the less educated and less affluent, the same group that research has shown is less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to get emergency room care, or to adhere to lifestyle changes after heart attacks.
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The New York Times (Class Matters)
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Hypertension is only a symptom of some other malfunction in your body. It’s possible that the elevated blood pressure is a protective effect, enabling the heart to get blood to all the tissues in spite of the disease, whatever that might be. But since we still haven’t figured out what that reason is, most physicians just throw drugs at the symptom and consider the problem solved when the high blood pressure goes down.
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Jordan S. Rubin (The Great Physician's Rx for High Blood Pressure)
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If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis. Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode. In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off. It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses. Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
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high magnesium consumption is believed to confer a degree of protection against stroke in those people with hypertension.
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James Lee (Just Keep Calm & Take Some Magnesium - Why a “boring” mineral is suddenly hot property for soothing bodies and calming minds)
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EXPERTS’ TOP TEN Mark Houston, M.D., M.S., F.A.C.P. Mark Houston is my go-to guy for anything at all to do with hypertension and/or metabolic syndrome.
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Jonny Bowden (The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What You Should Eat and Why)
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To maintain the same volume of blood flow through our narrowed and stiffened blood vessels, the heart has to generate increased pressure. As a result, more than half of us develop hypertension by the age of sixty-five.
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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The new diet inevitably included carbohydrate foods that could be transported around the world without spoiling or being devoured by rodents on the way: sugar, molasses, white flour, and white rice. Then diseases of civilization, or Western diseases, would appear: obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, various forms of cancer, cavities, periodontal disease, appendicitis, peptic ulcers, diverticulitis, gallstones, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and constipation. When any diseases of civilization appeared, all of them would eventually appear.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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require chronic or recurrent treatment with a
wide array of medications, some of which could aff ect insulin
sensitivity, �-cell function, or other aspects of glucoregulation. Whenever feasible, preference should be given to those
agents that are either neutral or beneficial in their eff ects on
carbohydrate and lipid metabolism.
In the sections that follow, diff erent classes of medications
will be discussed with regard to their impact on diabetes
risk. These medication classes were selected for discussion
based either on (a) their historical association with dysglycemia in clinical practice, (b) extensive utilization for the
management of comorbid conditions (e.g., hypertension,
dyslipidemia) in diabetic patients, or (c) existing or emerging
reports of possible association with
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Samuel Dagogo-Jack (Medications and Diabetes Risk: Mechanisms and Approach to Risk Reduction (Oxford American Pocket Notes))
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by the 1960s hypertension and high cholesterol were two of the three major risk factors associated with premature coronary heart disease (the third was smoking), so it was difficult to imagine that eating carbohydrates might be beneficial for one risk factor, cholesterol, while being detrimental for another, blood pressure.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)