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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what the truth is but after being diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol for the first time, why should I take chances? There is no harm in cutting back on red meat, fried foods, and saturated fat

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The harm is that you may end up replacing those foods with ones that may actually be to linked heart disease. You still have to eat a certain number of calories, so replacing red meat/fried food/saturated fat with say, bread or rice (which are low-fat) might actually increase your risk.

Yeah that goes without saying - part of eating "heart healthy" is cutting back on carbs, sugars and sodium.

I guess another way to put it is "I don't know what the truth is" is somewhat inconsistent with "there's no harm in cutting back on".

For instance, if someone said "drinking water decreases your sodium levels", and you said "there's no harm in cutting back on water", you'd be making a mistake.

I also think the full verdict is still out on what "heart healthy" means.

In your specific case, it could be family/genetic disposition to high blood pressure/cholesterol, environmental factors, or diet.

If it is diet, and you were eating more than the average person's amount of red meat, fried foods, and saturated fat, perhaps it will help you to cut back on those things, but you would need to do that for a while and keep everything else constant and see if things improved. If you weren't eating "lots" of those things to begin with, it's not clear reducing them further would make a difference.

I think this is why nutrition is so hard, it's almost impossible to really control all the variables and our objective measurements are lacking. For instance, "high cholesterol" doesn't tell you anything about the size of the cholesterol. High blood pressure may just run in your family. It's really hard to determine the effects of our diet.

True. But in my particular case I spent over 10 years eating like crap but exercising like crazy between being a part time fitness instructor and running that covered up a lot of sins. I cut down on exercising, got older, and it caught up to me. I acknowledge that it was all my fault.

Unless if by cutting red meat, fried foods, and saturated fat, you end up reducing satiety with your diet, and thus increasing your total calorie intake ("but it's low fat!"), in which case your high blood pressure and cholesterol levels will get worse.

Your best bet to fix high blood pressure and high cholesterol is to reduce weight, which almost always means reducing dietary calories by whatever diet composition works for you.

Well there's no harm in doing that, sure. The issue is that in order to compensate for the loss of that intake, people will resort to upping their intake of other things.

As an example, "light yogurt" is low on fat. To make up for the loss of flavor, they add sugar.

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