IOS 591: Apple's Health & Safety Features

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I purchased an Apple Watch for my wife in January, because she hasn’t had a fitness tracker for a couple of years, but is looking to change her job and wanted to monitor her exercise, especially the daily bike ride to work and back (50km round trip), because the new job she had applied for was much closer to home.

When setting up our Watches, I went through all the settings and turned everything on… We have now had to turn off the low heartbeat warning on my wife’s Watch, because it wakes her up several times every night! (After the second day, she booked an appointment with a cardiologist, but being woken a dozen times a night is irritating, we know she has to get it checked out, so we just leave it monitoring, but not warning.)

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I hope she’s ok! Knowing there’s potentially a problem must be stressful, but not getting sleep will definitely not improve things—good call on turning off the notifications.

She rides her bike a lot and people who do a lot of sport can have such a low resting pulse, but it still needs to be checked out.

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Human bodies are so strange, those who have excellent personal physical fitness can display the same symptoms as a physically unfit—but it’s only in the latter case is it problematic? You’d think evolution would have helped us out there!

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Sleep apnea perhaps?

I doubt it, her breathing rhythm doesn’t set off any alarms, although mine falls down to the alarm limit, but hasn’t actually triggered an alarm yet (10 breaths per minute).

We’ve changed so much in our environment in the last 30 years that could have a profound impact on all sorts of individual cardiovascular factors. Dietary changes include too many calories, too many calories from carbs and simple sugars, addition of unnatural trans fats to many processed foods (which depletes Vitamin K2), huge additions of dietary fructose (which can undermine liver function), etc. The Blind Watchmaker would have to crank very hard to adapt to all these changes. :grimacing:

We used to get huge amounts of infrared light daily, but reductions in our time outdoors, shifting to “efficient” LED lighting that generates nothing in the IR spectrum, and “efficient” IR-insulating glass leaves us severely deficient on our IR uptake. The video and science paper I noted in my iOS #590 comments points out that this IR deficiency can severely limit the antioxidants (!!!) in our mitochondria. Evolution has barely had a generation to provide any adaptations to these environmental changes; this IR-fueled source of antioxidants has been wired in our genetic ancestors for a very long time. Where would evolution find an alternative source of antioxidants? If some effective mutation actually happened, it would take thousands of years for the change to spread through our species.

I don’t think evolution is gonna help us. IMHO, we need to shift back our diet and other environmental factors to something more supportive of our design.

One question for @RosemaryOrchard: do you think that the Apple Watch is a superior solution to the monthly fee “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” services? These devices are “free”, but providers charge ~$30/month for the service.

Have you checked out the 2020 James Nestor book “Breath: the new science of a lost art”? There’s much info on the terribleness of mouth-breathing and ways to shift to nose-breathing. I’ve been practicing nose-breathing when exercising or walking for several years; I now keep my mouth shut naturally when sleeping. If only I could learn to keep my mouth shut other times…

Nestor has some interesting commentary on social media.

I can’t sleep, when I breath through my mouth. If my nose is blocked (cold, allergies etc.), I find it very hard to sleep, because I can’t breath properly, the more my nose is blocked, the more I end up clenching my teeth together.

I was taking the yellow bin (plastic/packaging rubbish) out for collection and thinking how much we’ve cut down on our packaging rubbish over the last 10 years. We used to fill the wheelie bin up, often over full, between collections. Now, we take the bin out every 2 - 3 collections, and it is often not full.

We generally cook fresh for every meal, or we use locally made cold cuts or cheese from the coutner, not from the cheap packaged meats. We usually keep a couple of pizzas in the freezer “for emergencies”, but they usually last a month of so in the deep freeze - it is mostly full of frozen meals we have made or frozen vegetables, like cauliflower or broccoli.

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In November 2021, I raised my Vitamin D supplementation to 5000 IU (125mcg) daily. I based that on this Pubmed science paper. Not only is this level of supplementation highly useful, but it is eminently safe if you are also consuming/supplementing Vitamin K2. K2 is something we need anyhow, but, astonishingly, the FDA has never ever set an RDA on that essential nutrient.

After raising my VitD supplementation, my blood hemoglobin level (measured during blood donation screening) was markedly higher. I see explanations in the literature why VitD’s anti-inflammatory effects would have an impact like that. I also noticed that my sinuses were markedly more clear: they felt like I’d been retrofitted with pipes about 40% larger in diameter. :smile: All nose-breathing is easier – especially at night. From the VitD paper:

Over the last decades, knowledge regarding the mechanisms through which vitamin D3 affects human health has improved dramatically. It was discovered that the vitamin D3 receptor (VDR) and the vitamin D3 activating enzyme 1-α-hydroxylase (CYP27B1) are expressed in many cell types that are not involved in bone and mineral metabolism, such as the intestine, pancreas, and prostate as well as cells of the immune system. This finding demonstrates the important, much wider impact of vitamin D3 on human health than previously understood. Vitamin D turned out to be a powerful epigenetic regulator, influencing more than 2500 genes and impacting dozens of our most serious health challenges, including cancer, diabetes mellitus, acute respiratory tract infections, chronic inflammatory diseases, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

VitD is cheap. There’s huge upside and essentially zero downside to raising supplementation. Anthony Fauci noted that he takes 6000 IU/day back in 2020 – but neither the FDA nor the NIAID have ever said a peep about raising the FDA’s ricket-y 800 IU/day RDA. Frustrating! At the same time, anyone who explores the science can take action themselves. This is a sad part of the digital divide.

I’ve been high dosing vitamin D, daily for 2 years now, it came up as part of health hacking on Security Now with Steve Gibson.

I take a natural D3/K2 product, with 5000mg/100mg respectively.

Good! I hadn’t ever Steve make such recommendations on his podcast; I thought those were always around 2000 IU/day. I see the forum on his website mentions 5,000IU/day – and @PHolder is part of the discussion there. Have you tested blood serum levels? Are you at/above 50 ng/mL of 25(OH)D3?

One of the brands that sells calcifediol notes that VitD uptake is higher when one uses that “activated” form of the vitamin. Variable uptake is a good reason to do the blood testing periodically.

I haven’t had my blood tested, but I can say, that I haven’t been sick over the last 2 years, even though my wife and the girls have been I’lla few times.

I will drop this here without further comment.

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Do you take big_D… :grinning:

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After asking Steve early in the pandemic I settled on 5,000 IU per day. He gave me the impression more was unnecessary, and there is a small risk of overdosing.

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