My experiments with preventing heart disease | Hacker News Reader

My experiments with preventing heart disease

blog.harjtaggar.com

53 pointskul20 comments

Its nice to see people spend more time thinking about their health and taking direct actions to improve it. This really stood out for me though:

>During these two months I'd not been exercising at all.

Working in the health field I can't begin to express how important it is to exercise frequently. The human body is designed to run, not to sit in an office for 8 hours a day punctuated by 2 minute walking breaks to the bathroom every few hours.

Also, stop eating once in a while. Nearly every culture and religion has a historical link to fasting yet only recently are the benefits being explored in a scientific manner.

Please fellow HN, take heed from the author and try to commit to a good diet and regular exercise, for the sake of you and your family.

Great work Harj, keep it up. You're a source of inspiration for many.

For how long and how often would you recommend we 'stop eating once in a while'? Or do you have resources that recommend what would be a beneficial amount of fasting?

Just wondering what steps I could take to be healthier, as I've never even considered fasting in the past. Thanks!

This is referring to Intermittent fasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting). The best guide I've seen to getting started with this is here: http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-beginners-guide...

This article addresses a huge problem that Eating Academy and https://www.plantdietlife.com/ is attempting to address. This issue should be especially important to a community who does a majority of their work sitting at a desk for long hours at a time.

Full Disclosure: It seems that Brenden is the owner and creator of plantdietlife. Five of the nine comments mightybrenden has made on HN are links to PDL.

This is the second or third time I have seen {endo|ecto|meso}morph come up on HN in the past week. I thought that the {endo|ecto|meso}morph theory was rejected by modern science and medicine. Has something changed or was I wrong to begin with? Is there any explanation for the recent occurrences: new fad diet or prominent blogger appropriating the term?

I wasn't aware the terms had been rejected. The terms aren't important though. The general concept that some people put on weight quicker than others, when lifestyle factors are controlled for, has been shown to be true by research.

This is a great article. Not to take anything away from the OP (just upvoted the post actually), but just out of curiosity I wonder why it is posted on HN. Is there certain range of topic the HN expect?

Substantive posts of intellectual interest are always welcome on Hacker News.

How substantive is an n=1 anecdote about some biomarker interventions with no hard endpoints?

statistically powerful stories ⊂ substantive stories

Thomas, in relation to my question and Daniel's answer, could you kindly explain the direction of the subset relation you are talking about there?

It's not a peer-reviewed controlled study, of course, but HN isn't a scientific journal. In my view the post is clearly substantive enough for a general interest site.

There's such a thing as a substantive anecdote, and self-observation and self-experimentation have a long and noble history. It's wrong, of course, to draw hard scientific conclusions from such a piece, but it's not wrong to read one, nor to write one, nor to do this kind of experimentation, nor to find it interesting. Plus there's a hacker angle in the DIY aspect.

That's my take on it, anyway. I thought it was cool, and I hope that HN readers are smart enough not to draw the obvious bogus conclusions.

One of the upsides to such posts is they can trigger comments that reference more rigorous sources. While I don't think this is intentional it feels like a variation on the trick of getting an answer to a question by either saying something can't be done or by posting obviously wrong or otherwise flawed code.

Basically, xkcd 386.

you're continuing to spread a myth

there is no link whatsoever between cholestoral (ldl/hdl) and heart disease, this has been proven beyond a doubt

heart disease is an inflammatory disorder

First of all, it's very difficult to prove a negative.

Second, I always thought that the specious connection was between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol, not necessarily the latter with heart disease.

Any comments/elaborations?

I think there are two issues:

1) The link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol.

2) The link between cholesterol and heart disease risk.

The former exists because research has shown that a large number of people don't seem to see an increase in blood cholesterol when they increase their dietary cholesterol, as I mentioned in the article.

The latter exists because people with seemingly healthy cholesterol levels, still develop heart disease, which has led to looking for alternative risk indications e.g. number of cholesterol particles vs total amount of cholesterol - the theory being that smaller, denser cholesterol particles may carry less total cholesterol but are more likely to cause plaque build up in the arteries.

A few years ago I saw a story on BBC suggesting a despairing outlook for people of the Indian subcontinent origin (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi - IPB); it was titled "Asian heart disease gene found". It reported that a significant percentage of IPBs have a gene that regardless of lifestyle and/or dietary choices, will kill them rather early [1]. I have not read the actual, grim study.

For non UK audience: Asian == UK term for people of the Indian subcontinent origin

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7833753.stm

I wasn't aware of this specific gene mutation but research has shown empirically that Indian men are at greater risk of premature heart disease than the average person (one UK study states up to 50% more) even when they were born and grew up in the West.

There is a link, but it's not what was previously understood.

See the following for a set of markers you should be tracking, thoroughly referenced for further reading. (Skip the first section if ketogenic is not for you.)

http://www.ketotic.org/2013/09/the-ketogenic-diet-reverses-i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com