Quote Originally Posted by peter mcneil View Post
Druff have you watched any of the videos in this thread? Your belief that blood pressure is almost entirely hereditary is incorrect. It's old school thinking that is rapidly changing. Your gene expression is impacted by life style.

Have you or any of your parents or grandparents ever attempted a very healthy lifestyle? I can look at you and know for a fact you eat like shit. I'd also be willing to make a bet, up to $1000 that your own personal blood pressure would improve if you adopted a low sodium, zero sugar diet, exercised a bit and ate a lot of fresh vegetables, fruit and healthy fats. I think there are ways a bet like this could be managed, even starting with a set weight loss number.

I know this because I changed mine dramatically and studies are conclusively proving it to be true. It's totally correct that you are born with a certain set of genetic traits but how your genes express themselves can be lifestyle dependent. Read up on epigenetics and the influence we have on gene expression.

The first paragraph in this study explains that you're incorrect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848907/

Copy and paste below from conclusions.

6. Conclusions
We are entering a new era of understanding how the genome interacts with the environment to affect disease pathogenesis. There is now emerging evidence that epigenetic, as well as genetic, factors are key players in regulating and maintaining blood pressure, and strong evidence for a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors that influence the risk of HT in each individual
It's actually not old school thinking. The old school thinking was that you need to obsessively watch your diet in order to prevent high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

I still see 1970s All in the Family episodes where Edith tells Archie he can't have salt because his blood pressure will go up.

The conclusion you pasted above does not contradict my point. Rather, it seems to be making the case that there's a "complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors" increasing the risk of hypertension. So it seems to be saying that they now theorize that certain people are predisposed to high blood pressure by genetics, but some of those people can keep it down through lifestyle/diet changes.

However, I have enough anecdotal evidence from people I know personally to say that it's often not the case. I know people who have horrible diets and have normal blood pressure (Master Scalir is a good example), and others who have great diets and other healthy lifestyle choices, yet have very high blood pressure (before medication).

In fact, among people I know, I have seen zero correlation between lifestyle/diet and blood pressure. Aside from the obvious age factor, it otherwise seems almost random to me. If you presented me with 20 people I knew fairly well (but had no info about their blood pressure), I wouldn't be able to guess who had high, marginal, or normal blood pressure.