If you had to eliminate your overindulgence in just one thing to improve your heart health, it would probably be sodium. But there's another thing — impossible for many people to reduce at all — that's just as bad for your heart and blood pressure as a high-sodium diet.
My endocrinologist put me on a low-sodium diet for a year or two, quite a while back, when I was coming out of remission from Grave's disease — and I cannot begin to tell you how much that sucked. My naughty thyroid gland has long since been nuked out of existence (RAI treatment), so I was free to resume my naughty ways of sitting down with a large bag of Cape Cod White Cheddar Cheese Popcorn and eating the whole thing.
But I didn't. Truth be told, I started to feel pretty bad going back to that all-American, high-sodium lifestyle after a forced period of comparatively clean living. I say "comparatively" because, as I reminded my endo on a couple of visits, scotch is a low-sodium drink.
So while I'm not exactly low sodium, I do keep to a lower-sodium diet. Not only do I feel better, but when I fall off the wagon for more than a few days in a row, I quickly add four or five pounds of water weight — right to my butt and belly. No thanks!
I have noticed though that if there's one thing that sends my blood pressure higher than a lunch of ramen noodles and Flamin' Hot Cheetos, it's getting stuck in traffic. As it turns out, I'm not alone.
A University of Washington study found that "commuters who travel on high-traffic highways every day may be putting their cardiovascular health at risk." According to the report, "unfiltered air from rush-hour traffic appeared to significantly increase passengers’ blood pressure," both while driving and for up to 24 hours afterward.
That means that if you're driving in heavy traffic five days a week, that's six days of increased blood pressure with only Sunday as a brief respite. Just try not to get stuck in traffic on your way to or from church, right?
"The idea that roadway air pollution at relatively low levels can affect blood pressure this much is an important piece of the puzzle we’re trying to solve," said one of the study's authors. "Incredibly, findings show the size of the observed increase is comparable to the effect of a high-sodium diet."
Except I think there's more to it than just the environmental factors. I'm not recommending that people go out and breathe in all the unfiltered car exhaust they can handle, but hear me out.
Maybe it's not so much the fumes as it is the people producing them.
Few things rile me up or get my blood racing and heart pounding quite as badly as my fellow motorists — and I say this as the father of not one but two teenage boys.
I'm talking about the free-range jerkweasels who have no idea what the left lane on the freeway is for. Or the distracted carpool mom who blasts through residential stop signs without so much as a rolling stop. Or the utter craptaculance of the guy who turns out in front of you at the speed of heat, cutting you off, only to then drive an aggressive three miles under the speed limit.
The worst are the ingrates.
I was taking my 13-year-old to the Y last week. As we were preparing to turn right off a side street to a major road, I noticed a guy in a Nissan trying to leave the corner 7-11, who must have been sitting there for five or six cars already with no relief in sight. So instead of pulling up to the stop sign when it was my turn, I held back and motioned him to make his turn.
The Nissan and I ended up right next to each other a few seconds later at the stoplight to the I-25 on-ramp. The light turned green, all the cars advanced, and as the onramp narrowed to one lane, the ungrateful jerkweasel sped up and cut us off instead of merging every other car.
I said some words very loudly that my 13-year-old should not have heard but nevertheless has heard his dad say in traffic many times before. I shouldn't have let Mr. Nissan get to me like that. But all I'd expected for letting him in was a Nice Guy Wave, and what I got was cut off on a crowded onramp. People like that get people killed.
Other drivers can be enough to send a person's blood pressure into the stratosphere, even if other cars spewed nothing but Chanel perfume instead of hydrocarbons.
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