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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. I'm affected by high blood pressure so I monitor it pretty closely.

If I need to get my blood pressure down, there are three levers that consistently work:

° reducing sodium - note: I really like salty things, so it's very easy for me to push 6-7k mg or more, especially when I was in college eating cafeteria and frozen food constantly. Also, drowning things in hot sauce, to which I am mildly addicted.

° exercising.

° cutting out alcohol and certain other vices.

Everyone's different, so if you're worried about it, talk to your doctor and consider starting a monitoring program. I like home monitoring; IME knowing exactly the impact of my choices on my blood pressure helps me make good choices.

It's good to hear the guidance might become a little more sane - it is extremely difficult to eat a normal (by any American standard at least) diet and be less than a few thousand mg.

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> 6-7k mg

Why not say grams? A thousand miligrams is a gram.

I've always "suffered" from low blood pressure. Never quite to the point of fainting when I stand up too quick, but it's been close a few times. Exercise for me means I have to go out of my way to supplement sodium or I start getting muscle cramps.

So I wonder, what does high pressure feel like? How do you know when it's too high? Or is it just something you notice on a device and know to fix because doctors say so?

Most people find out from having it measured at a doctor's checkup, but, if it gets high enough it feels like someone's squeezing your brain.

The lack of symptoms for most people is why the US has things like free blood pressure checkups, and automated machines in the waiting areas of pharmacies.

It feels like there's too much blood in my head/face.

Most food packaging measures sodium in mg, so I feel using those units is easier to reason about for most people.

There is a reason the SI system uses decades. It's exactly that it makes this trivial, but I guess if one is not that accustomed to thinking in decimals/metric, it might not be as obvious.

mg is also just composed of the SI prefix m = milli, and the SI unit g = gram, where the latter is a little weird due to naming problems early on leading to it being the only SI unit where the base unit, the kg = kilogram already has a prefix.

The milli means thousands, so you are just saying 6 thousand thousands gram. If you internalize SI units, and decompose them automatically, this seems at least confusing, possibly worse, depending on how picky the reader is about unnecessarily contorted grammar in general.

I myself advocate the use of prefixed gram for the cases where people use tons, but I accept that people in general don't like them being called megagrams = Mg from now on. This is by the way the reason why mb != MB when denoting storage space, but 8e9 mb = 1 MB, due to the former denoting millibits, and the latter megabytes. There is also MiB, mibibytes, denoting 2^30 B. Microsoft denotes MiB as MB, which is wrong, and lead to great confusion. Be careful, embrace SI units, they make your life easier.

Using SI doesn't mean you shouldn't maintain consistency between units you're actively comparing to avoid inadvertent conversion error. If your working units are mg, using mg across the board is completely sensible. It lowers the mental load involved and reduces the chance of the human factor introducing errors.

It has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with working with SI units and everything to do with having a consistent working environment for me.

For example, If I were drawing something up in CAD and needed a particular face to be 120mm, I'm completely aware that could be represented as 12cm, but I want the software to label that as 120mm so that it's consistent with e.g., a 23mm face next to it.

Your working units for sodium in food consumption are milligrams. Labeling the final sum the same way is a good thing.

Sure, but say 6000 mg, don't say 6k mg.

That'd be ideal, yes, but I'll take 6k mg over 6g when mg are the working units every time. The k makes it much more explicit that there was a shift in magnitude than just silently converting between units.

Yes, but if the face is 1200mm, you do see it as 1.2 m. I rarely like the intermediate units (1e1, 1e2, 1e-1, 1e-2), as they feel like bikeshedding.

It might look wrong in isolation, however the choice of unit do add context to a conversation. For example, there are instances where one would say "twenty hundred" instead of "two thousand". Sodium too is typically denoted in milligrams because most other micronutrients are measured in the same unit.

Terrible headaches.

In most cases, it feels like absolutely nothing.

Above roughly 150 systolic, it can start to manifest as headaches (as others have mentioned), but doesn't always.

In my case, after it had gone undiagnosed long enough (by an incompetent doctor), I had extremely severe headaches, constant nausea and vomiting, and vision problems that turned out to be capillary hemorrhages in my retinas. That was at around 240/120.

BUT: I am extremely lucky to have had all those horrendous symptoms. They alerted me to the severity of the problem, and caused me to escalate to a competent doctor. For many people who get up to that level of blood pressure, the first (and potentially last) symptom is a stroke or a heart attack.

I haven't looked into it, but are there really no other cations besides sodium that can create the salty flavor sensation on human taste buds? I would find that surprising, given all of the work and industry around sugar substitutes.

Also, what is your personal experience - if any - with heavy potassium supplementation?

potassium chloride tastes salty but also has a strong metallic feel, it's what most salt substitutes are made out of

I see Aluminium Chloride salt sachets in fast food outlets from time to time.

The last time I tried it, I detected only bitterness, not saltiness.

I also wonder why potassium chloride is not being promoted heavily, in the face of low recommended intake of sodium, IIRC the recommended potassium intake is much higher than that of sodium.

The reason is that there is a lot of overlap of patients with hypertension and chronic kidney disease. When your kidneys don't filter as well, one of things that your body holds onto is potassium. High potassium levels (among other things) cause cardiac conduction issues and arrhythmias which can be fatal if not intervened on. I. The general population we have to be careful that we don't trade one problem for another.

On the other hand, _low_ potassium can also cause heart problems. You just can't win!

That's true as well, fortunately(?) it's much harder to get to cardiac issues with hypokalemia than hyperkalemia (most commonly I see it in anorexics).

Most causes of low potassium are side effects of medications, or short term losses from diarrhea or vomiting. There are some people with genetic causes of excess urinary potassium losses but it's pretty uncommon.

For cooking I use a mixture of sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium sulphate (50:40:9, the remainder is iodine) tastes just like pure NaCl to me. It's a brand called Seltin here in Norway.

I don't think there's any confusion that people who are sensitive to sodium & benefit from cutting back should cut back. If you know it works, great! The argument is about everyone else, especially all the folks who have no idea whether reducing sodium helps them or not.

Do you also use caffeine? I have a low-moderate salt diet but had high-ish BP a couple years ago, turns out I was drinking too much coffee.

Does caffeine affect your blood pressure? I found mine went way down when I quit.

From what I've read, that's another everybody-is-different sort of thing. The median effect is marginal (like a few mmHg, if I recall correctly), but there's a wide distribution, and some people are affected much more than others.

> reducing sodium

What do you mean by that? If you're talking about salt, then that's sodium chloride, not sodium. Can't you just say reducing salt?

Is this a joke from the literal police?

Sodium is what has a RDV and a listing in products' nutrition facts, so it makes the most sense to discuss it in that fashion.

You can also get some of it from things like baking soda - salt isn't the sole dietary source.

What do you mean by that? If you’re talking about sodium chloride, then that’s sodium chloride, not salt. Can’t you just say reducing sodium chloride?

It's amazing to me that people still believe high blood pressure is some lifelong ailment you need to learn to cope with. Of all "diseases" it is pretty much the easiest to fix. It is well known that as short as a 8-10 day water fast is sufficient to drop any medication and restore a normal life, provided of course that you resume at least a somewhat normal diet and not McDonalds, high protein Keto crap, etc. It's really remarkable how such a "disease" can be sold to the public as a lifelong issue.

I am interested in your hypothesis and would like to see the research supporting it.

If reducing high blood pressure is important to you, don't trust a random dude on HN. Spend some time researching the concept of water fasting as well as dry fasting and you will find the literature that leads you to conclude it is a worthwhile effort for your best shot at curing many man made "diseases" such as high blood pressure, diabetes, Crohn's and all other IBS/Ds, among many many many others.

The information is readily accessible and available to be found if you do it with an open mind.

I don't have links or whatever to send you. This is not a new topic for me so I don't have a folder with bookmarks I keep around to include in my replies here or elsewhere. I have been around fasting (water, dry, and grape fasting) and herbal remedies for the last 20 years and have seen hundreds, probably thousands, of people cure diseases their top doctors once said were incurable. But again, don't believe me (and most don't, hence why I always get downvoted or flagged), believe yourself once you open up your mind to life changing information that's out there. When you realize your health is quite literally in your own hands, you free yourself to find the right information.

> hence why I always get downvoted or flagged),

Actually, I suspect this complaint itself that causes it. Especially combined with words and phrases that tend to inflame skepticism. It's a bit disingenuous to imply otherwise.

Today was the first time I ever complained about getting downvoted because I know it triggers HNers instantly.

> Today was the first time I ever complained about getting downvoted

Well that's (easily) verifiable as false, and the behavior is contrary to the guidelines regardless of any "trigger".

You are correct, I did mention it once more 22 days ago. Forgot about that one. Prior to that I've had thousands of comments here on HN in the last 10 years that I have not mentioned it in. And many have been downvoted within minutes or as I mentioned, more recently flagged.

Well, if you'd like to be upvoted, maybe find a couple of those study links.

I looked into water fasting several years ago because a friend's father went on a 40 day water fast to address cancer. Everything I found at that time was that it was dangerous.

He made it through the fast and the cancer didn't get any worse, but it didn't do any good. My friend was just relieved that he didn't badly hurt himself. He subsequently went on chemo, which worked.

> It is well known

A quick search suggests that is mainly known among alternative therapy sites and there isn't much science backing it up. Since high-blood pressure costs the NHS in excess of £2bn a year, I would expect a fair degree of research.

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