How could a 71 year old junk food addict, technically bordering on the obese weight category, and with high cholesterol have an “excellent” heart?
Yesterday I listened to the president’s doctor release the details of the Presidents recent health check up. The doctor was asked by reporters why his heart was in good health, when he ate junk food, was overweight and had high cholesterol. This after stress testing, echocardiograms, and so on, indicating his heart was in great shape.
The doctor put it down to his lifetime abstinence from alcohol, smoking and luck. He said the president must have excellent genes. But I believe there could be more to it than genetic luck.
The Donald did though, have a good coronary calcium score (my research suggests this is the most accurate non invasive test for heart attack and stroke risk, more accurate than cholesterol tests) and blood pressure of 122 over 74. This is an excellent blood pressure and there is little doubt that high blood pressure is clearly the greatest risk factor for heart disease.
Then a reporter asked about the presidents stress levels, now I was really listening;
⇒Because being president of the USA would be a really stressful job,
⇒And in my lifetime most presidents took office with natural hair colour and left office with grey hair (unless they were impeached or assassinated) and
⇒It is known that acute stress or anxiety causes arteries to contract, stiffen and blood pressure to rise!
There is at this time no hard evidence to positively say that chronic (long term subliminal stress) stress also raises blood pressure. But chronic stress is hard to determine, its subconscious, so many of us would not know whether it was occuring or not. I believe that biologically it certainly could raise our “normal” blood pressure, so I was very interested in the answer the doctor would give re the stress question. His answer went like this;
This is the third president I have served as their personal doctor, I work in the White House and see the president every day, and he is different. Every day is a brand new day for him, what happened yesterday doesn’t seem to matter.
Maybe we could all lower blood pressure a little if we had the same attitude in our own lives. The Doc did say he was going to try and get the President to eat better food and do some exercise to lose 10 to 15 pounds over the next year, but he didn’t sound too confident that he would actually succeed.
Maybe the Doctor should try the Rewired way on the President?