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Comment by gear54rus | Hacker News Reader

And none of these numbers can be expressed with proper measurement units most of the world uses... Instead we have lbs feet and inches.

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I came here to say exactly the same. Maybe you could add a radio button, or better, try to get geographical information from the IP and display the units accordingly (but don't forget about the other two countries that still use the imperial system, the USA aren't yet alone ;) ).

In any case I'm glad that I'm at relatively low risk despite being overweight (but a little less each day). I guess that low blood pressure and zero smoking are that good.

My caffeine intake is also zero (Ok, I think that cocoa powder has some, so not literal zero). I wonder if that has any effect on my risk, maybe something indirect through blood pressure.

If you're officially "overweight", and not any category of obese (at least by BMI), you might be better off not trying to lose any more. There seems to be a growing consensus that the best all-causes mortality rate is actually for people in the overweight category [1]. Yes, correlation and causation and all relevant caveats apply. Personally, and IANAMD, I think as long as the weight is not causing noticeable quality of life drops, you're better off not stressing about it, and just trying to live life comfortably. Eat well and exercise, but if your body doesn't want to give up that extra reserve, don't force it.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23280227 --- n.b. I haven't actually read the article, but I'm assuming the abstract isn't lying when it says "overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality".

It considers me to have a high BMI - yet my body fat is relatively low. I was lighter and fatter until I started working out; now I am heavier and slimmer. My clothes are generally looser, except my shirts and jackets, which are snugger around the chest.

Considering that, overall, my doctor believes I had a low risk of cardiovascular disease before I started exercising regularly, and now believes my risk to be lower, I take the risk numbers with a grain of salt - and a dab of butter.

Speaking of fat, as others have noted, total cholesterol may be meaningless. If I told you my total, you'd likely call an ambulance. But my triglycerides are low and my HDL/tri and HDL/total ratios are so good they are silly.

Based on everything my doctor knows - and she's scientifically minded, curious, and thorough, traits unusual in family doctors AFAICT - my risk of cardiovascular disease is in the low single digits.

Yet this test tells me my best case is mid 30s and my current close to 50.

Yeah, uh huh, I'm going to take medical advice from an app prepared by someone who lived an anecdote.

(No disrespect intended. Our personal experiences tend to not be transferable, no matter how much we learn about our case, because we learn about our case - not about all cases, with a dash of probability and a hint of objectivity.)

Hey! Which units would you prefer?

For height/weight, I'd assume meters and kg?

When you get your cholesterol measurements, do use mg/dL, mmol/L, or something else? What about blood pressure?

Hello,

Ideally, there should be an ability to switch. Regarding height and weigh - its metric meters and kilograms. Not sure about others.

Thanks.

It's pretty amusing that you're complaining about the units (and wanting non-American units is fair) but don't actually know what units you want.

Well I certainly know one of two bits of information this app can use to make its guess but I still can't use it because.. well.. you know. Defeats the purpose altogether.

And making the units even more alien doesn't help when you have to look them up and after an exhausting search find out they are imperial/metric and have to convert further.

cm and kg

I live in the UK, I think of my height in feet and inches and my weight in Kilograms. Blood pressure is in mmHg while cholesterol is in mmol/L.

Obviously metric, since that's what most of the world uses abd you're cutting yourself from a large chunk of your potential audience. The cholesterol measures are already metric.

The site is going to be limited to the US anyway. The data is calculated from a US population for US lifestyles. And the racial information is US-centric. Does 'Asian' mean Korean, Indian, or Palestinian? Is an African African-American? Even if they're Moroccan? The medical term for that genotype is 'negro', but that word has far too much baggage to be used with a primarily US audience.

Meters and kilos. My blood analysis data is in g/L (but the conversion is easy).

And none of this website can be expressed with a proper language most of the world uses... Instead we have English.

Unfortunately, until we figure out an easy way to convert between unit systems, our only recourse is to complain on hacker news.

Yeah you can convert between units. But as soon as I saw imperial units I just closed the site. If you want to publish something on the Internet you have to take into account that users will be way too lazy to convert. And I don't want to support imperial measurements in any way or form so I would rather not use a site or a service that uses them.

This worked well to convert mmol/l to mg/dl: http://www.soc-bdr.org/rds/authors/unit_tables_conversions_a...

That table is for glucose only. It would be the same for cholesterol if and only if a glucose molecule weighs the same as a cholesterol molecule (is it even possible to do that conversion, given that there are at least two different kinds of cholesterol, with different atomic masses?)

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