dads in the hospital over night bc of eating a high sodium, fat, processed foods, meat and dairy diet. mom and him are both guilty. im re reading dr gregers "how not to die". thought this was interesting:
To answer this question, researchers would have to find a group of individuals who eat the standard American diet but are also as thin as people eating plant-based diets. To find an omnivorous group that fit and trim, researchers recruited long-distance endurance athletes who had run, on average, forty-eight miles per week for twenty-one years. Running almost two marathons a week for twenty years, pretty much anyone can become as slim as a plant eater no matter what they eat! The researchers then compared these hard-core athletes to two groups: sedentary meat eaters who exercised less than an hour per week and sedentary vegans who ate mostly unprocessed, uncooked plant foods.
How did the numbers come out? Not surprisingly, the endurance runners on a standard American diet had a better blood pressure average than their sedentary, meat-eating counterparts: 122/72 compared with 132/79, which fits the definition of prehypertensive. But the sedentary vegans? They averaged an extraordinary 104/62. apparently, eating standard American fare even when running two thousand miles a year may not bring down your blood pressure as low as a being a couch-potato vegan.