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Comment by wikibob | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, no offense intended: what is your level of fitness and BMI?

None at all. Being ~5'9" & 135 lbs, my back-of-the-napkin BMI is ~20.

Fitness is pretty low these days given COVID, but I used to be quite fit (former Fitness company). That didn't really move my BP much.

My biggest levers for BP are salt intake and work stress. Currently a co-founder so work stress is rather high handled with a bit of mitigation practices like meditation, but definitely not enough.

Overall I'm on borrowed time of sorts and do my best to be thankful for each day... doesn't always come through.

140/100 isn't going to call time on you tomorrow. There are people on that who go rolling along for years. I'm sure neither you nor your GP like this rating but its important not to catastrophise. If you have some specific co-morbidity that might be different: e.g. leaky blood vessels in the brain or atherosclerosis.

Not a GP, not giving advice.

Unfortunately hypertension can cause great damage if left untreated for a long time: kidney disease and heart disease most obviously but from my understanding, any organ that has blood vessels can be affected and damaged, including brain, eyes, liver, lungs... The OP is not catastrophising, but trying to be pragmatic (although I hope that with treatment they will be able to live as long as they would have without the hypertension).

As a hypertension sufferer I know the harm it can cause but as a 140/100 for over twenty five years aged 59 with intermittent treatment, I'm struggling with the idea it's an imminent problem in and of itself compared to eg untreated 160/120 or worse.

Reading around, health standards vary by economy. Maybe australia has a different cutoff bp to the USA. The nih say you need five visits to be assessed on 140/100.

Many people with hypertension have comorbidities. Diabetes for instance, which also causes neuropathy.

Is it ideal? No. Far from it. I wish I could get mine lower. I see my health professional regularly, I am taking my prescribed medication, and I exercise. I have had no signal that I am facing imminent demise. Far from it.

That's all I meant really: if there is no other problem, I think treated 140/100 could be sustained for some time.

Reading the OP's comment again, they did not talk of an "imminent demise". They said that their genetics "puts a cap" on their "life expectancy". Hence my own comment about hypertension causing damage if left untreated "for a long time".

A significant minority are quite sensitive to salt. I fixed my high blood pressure by reducing salt intake. I got it down to hunter-gather levels - less than 1 g per day and combined with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables for potassium. It took a week before I started to notice my BP falling. Came down from 135/85 to 115/70 over a period of 12 weeks. Also cut out alcohol, anything more than a glass of wine raises my BP for a day or so afterwards. Of course, you can't eat any pre-prepared food this way as it has way too much salt. No bread, cheese, butter etc. Food begins to taste much better after a couple of weeks on a low salt diet as salt dulls the sense of taste.

Can confirm. I cook a salt-free cuisine for my relative [1] who has kidney disease and must aggressively control their blood pressure and I can go entire months without eating anything with any salt at all. There was a bit of an adjustment to be had in the first few months, from what I recall, but I was surprised to what degree my taste buds adjusted after a while. Nowadays, I can't enjoy normally salted food because it registers as very salty. I have particular trouble with cheeses, even cheese like feta or camembert that only have about 1.5 - 2% salt.

Speaking of cheese and bread, most of the internet will say it's impossible, but I've found some evidence online (reddit threads and blog posts and the like) of people who actually make both bread and cheese without salt at all (because of hypertension) and they seemed to be doing fine. This was about half a year ago so I can't find the sources again, but in any case salt-free cheese and bread making is possible. I've made a few loaves of bread without salt myself and they're OK, though they taste a lot better when they're made wth sourdough (which is a pain to maintain) rather than dried yeast, because the sourdough adds taste and the dried yeast only air!

What's the problem with butter? I can find both salt-free and salt-full in most countries in the EU that I've visited.

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[1] well... I cook for the entire household :)

Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough for butter. I was mainly using it for cooking and ended up using olive oil for most things. I used to have a bread machine, and bread seemed to bake just fine without salt. Store bought bread without salt was impossible to find.

Well, olive oil is supposed to be better anyway. Although it seems to me that everytime I find a study that claims health benefits from olive oil consumption it's conducted by a Spanish or Greek university (I'm Greek btw, so made of ~80% olive oil).

I can find salt-free bread from local bakeries in Greece. Also, salt-free rusks (popular in Greece) seem to be a trend, there's three or four different brands that sell them in supermarkets.

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