Jailbreak

I have a friend whose dad has been in the hospital for 10 days because of high blood pressure. Nothing the doctors have tried seems to fix it. He’s on multiple medications with very little progress. The prolonged hospital stay has drained his motivation; he’s clearly more depressed than he was. They’ve accomplished very little, and there’s been almost no communication with the family about what the end goal even is. His blood pressure is still running high, so not much has really been accomplished.

My friend was on the verge of staging a jailbreak to get his dad out and take him home. I recommended Double Quarter Pounders with cheese, a fried egg on top, no bun, no fries, no soda. I told him to follow this approach for a week. The evidence behind blood-pressure control (low-salt diets), saturated fat, & cholesterol) is not only outdated but most likely completely wrong.

That said, I discussed the potential risk with my friend. If his father—who is obviously metabolically unhealthy—were to have a bad outcome like a heart attack or stroke while still in the hospital, the doctors would call it inevitable. If he went home, ate my diet for one week, and then had a bad outcome, the doctors would blame my intervention.

Which flies in the face of logic. If you believe that high blood pressure/salt, cholesterol, and saturated fat cause heart disease, heart attacks, and strokes, then you also believe those processes take years—or decades—to develop. Someone doesn’t typically have a stroke the same day they’re diagnosed with high blood pressure (yes, you could have had undiagnosed high blood pressure for years and then suffer a stroke, which is how everything comes to light at once). But what I’m talking about is the long, slow damage supposedly caused by high blood pressure, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

So it’s pretty ironic that in one week’s time, the exact same bad outcome would be viewed in two completely different ways. At the end of the day, my friend’s metabolically unhealthy father is a metabolic time bomb. Pretty much any intervention at this point is moot—the horse is out of the barn. He’s been metabolically unwell for decades.