Stroke Risk and Celebrities and Schadenfreude
Stroke Risk and Celebrities and Schadenfreude
With so many young and famous in the news recently, dying of their own stupidity, we can enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, sure, but then we must move on to our own stupidity.
Stroke Risk and The Teachable Moment
We use the lives of celebrities as teachable moments for our children – look at Lindsay Lohan driving drunk, kids – when we should be following our own advice. Because our own stroke risk is cosmically much more important than the drug-induced deaths of the famous.
Assessing our Stroke Risk
Maybe we should take a moment and work through the online worksheets to assess our stroke risk – this will usually include whether we smoke, whether we drink too much.
While there is a certain schadefreude in the notion that River Phoenix was a vegetarian and died of a drug overdose, the really important lesson to derive is to pay attention to our own stroke risk lifestyle factors.
Lifestyle Choices and Stroke Risk
“Intemperance may addle the rich, but it devastates the poor.” Just a little too much increases our own stroke risk when it comes to alcohol. A steady diet of more than 2 drinks a day may increase your stroke risk by 50% – couple that with smoking, which doubles your stroke risk, and you have both a difficult math problem and a very probable stroke.
Stroke Risk and Celebrity Death
When celebrities overindulge and die, we enjoy watching their entourages fight over the money, but when we, the common man, die from ignoring our own stroke risk, it’s not so funny. When a child can’t go to college because his dad overindulged himself and died young, it might make a good Lifetime movie, but it makes a very bad reality.
