What Do We Need to Be Healthy?
Lifestyle is important
If we feel good, we believe we are healthy. We believe we can eat junk, without harm. We can drink without harm. When we are healthy, everything is good.
If we feel bad, we believe we are sick. We believe we need external help. We seek doctors to fix us so we can be healthy and go back to eating junk and drinking as much as we want.
To really be healthy we must begin by challenging our beliefs. No doctor believes that we can tell how healthy we are by how we feel. Different doctors place importance on tests for their specialty.
Many doctors take blood pressure. They believe that having high blood pressure places you at higher risk for problems such as stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure. Yet many people with high blood pressure seem to do well. My mother had high blood pressure and did not seem to be any worse off than her peers who were taking medicine to control theirs. She died at the age of 89 and was doing very well up until the last few years. She seemed to adapt well in spite of hypertension.
Does it make sense to control blood pressure with medication? It might. The evidence seems inconclusive. One study followed 745 hypertensive men and compared them to men with normal blood pressure for nearly three decades. “In spite of a substantial reduction of their blood pressure, treated hypertensive middle-aged men had a highly increased risk of stroke, MI and mortality from coronary heart disease compared with nonhypertensive men of similar age. The increased risk of cardiovascular complications escalated during the latter course of the study.” (1)
From another study, “These findings suggest that adherence to healthy lifestyle and antihypertensive medication treatment were associated with lower risk of mortality among adults with hypertension. These findings further support that, in addition to antihypertensive medication use, adopting a healthy lifestyle is associated with benefits in the prevention of premature death among individuals with hypertension.” (2) What is a healthy lifestyle? In the study, body mass index, smoking status, diet, physical activity, and sleep duration, were evaluated.
We will look at those factors in future posts. For now: Don’t smoke. Keep your weight under control. Watch your diet. Exercise. Get plenty of sleep.
Of course, neither of the studies consider the role of the brain and nervous system in helping us adapt. Nor did they consider the problems that may occur due to problems of the spine affecting the nervous system and reducing our ability to adapt. That is chiropractic.
(1) Almgren T, Persson B, Wilhelmsen L, Rosengren A, Andersson OK. Stroke and coronary heart disease in treated hypertension -- a prospective cohort study over three decades. J Intern Med. 2005 Jun;257(6):496-502. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2796.2005.01497.x. PMID: 15910553.
(2) Lu Q, Zhang Y, Geng T, Yang K, Guo K, Min X, He M, Guo H, Zhang X, Yang H, Wu T, Pan A, Liu G. Association of Lifestyle Factors and Antihypertensive Medication Use With Risk of All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Adults With Hypertension in China. JAMA Netw Open. 2022 Feb 1;5(2):e2146118. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.46118. PMID: 35103793; PMCID: PMC8808332.