Going on an actual calorie restricted diet while consuming cannabis is basically impossible for me.
Then instead of walking 60 minutes I end up sitting and listening to music.
There is really not anything for me that correlates with healthy behavior when I smoke.
Set and Setting are also relevant too. If you do it a soecfic way with other soecific tools and activities while on it, that all gets packaged and reinforced.
Well, Id guess these are reasons for any case of substance missuse?
^^ many of those are boring people.
Anecdotal of course, many could probably bring up counter-stories too, but I do think you bring up a good point, it seems to me a completely sedentary lifestyle seems to be way more destructive to your health than moderate usage of various drugs and/or eating habits. People who just walk a bit daily already seem way healthier and happier than peers in their same age.
but sure, still lets make to account by other "legal" substances (alco, tobacco, cocaine, pharmaceutics and other "lifestyle choices" infecting cardiovascular system) and way they are consumed(smoked, ingested, pure or with say tobacco)
would love see data for a group who consumes cannabis by ingestion and especially not via smoking!
also- do they differ different thc/cbd grades used (high/low thc, "medical")?
im regards "research demonstrates something does this.." for many years alcohol was considered "healthier" over non consumption, just becauses non-drinkers were together with those of abstinent ex-alcholics.. thus average score was lower than for those who drunk minimal amounts and were considered "healthier".
about the 'study': I do not trust anything that comes out of meta studies given how many base studies are found to be either garbage or very lacking in controls. And without knowing an accurate life history it is hard to rule out or quantify damages done much earlier in life.
Edit:
Realized this comment sounds like fear mongering, so decided to dig up some actual sources. The wiki page I needed to find was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_cannabis
Also, the CDC page mentions it:
https://www.cdc.gov/cannabis/health-effects/heart-health.htm...
And links to this paper (though I can't read past the abstract bc no institutional access):
There's a mind body connection that an altered state can throw into disarray.
Well, under the influence of cannabis, one may be a lot more aware of physical pain, dehydration, and so on. The key word is aware. Suddenly becoming aware of the fact that you are stressed out, you are carrying tension, can lead to something of a latent processing effect of some of these suppressed or physically felt emotions.
However, if you're generally not tense, ingesting cannabis itself does not always raise the heart rate. I can validate this myself right now, given I wear an Apple Watch and can vaporize cannabis. Looking at my historical data, there is no relationship, and my resting heart rate remains in the 40s.
It's anecdotal, but at the same time we need to be careful with something that acts on the physical, the mental, and dare I say it, the spiritual. If we focus too much on one dimension, we lose the important synergy from processing all dimensions.
After the experience I felt kind of weird and "slow" for several days. Later I found out that there is also a genetic risk of schizophrenia in my family. No way I'm going to touch anything with THC ever again. I've tried CBD oil though and that was okay, slightly calming effect. But ultimately I prefer beer over that too.
We (general West) have no overarching myth or support system to help people navigate this type of pure madness. We have a psychological framework, and anything that interferes with our capacity to construct an I, a me, an ego in real time is seen in the most ultimately negative terms. And the experience is terrifying, such to support these terms.
Though, if through meditation, through religious constructs, or similar, there is a learned capacity to sit with the experience, it is considered less of a breaking and more of a liberation.
Wouldn't recommend it, wouldn't prescribe it. Though this decoupling of self from experience isn't a universal ill.
I think weed should be legal and for the majority of people used in moderation it's going to be fine, but at the end of the day it's a psychoactive drug. It's probably not optimal to use it daily and in particular waking and baking every day is asking for trouble.
Also a case to be made that modern strains are worse. I fully believe that the risk of losing the plot is higher when you're smoking some lemon sherbet bubblegum flavours every day instead of old fashioned moroccan hash
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42238-025-00277-9
At some point in time, it's important to realize that not everyone optimizes for longevity, correctness, rationalism, and so on, and they just simply do what makes them feel good within the limited life that they have.
Nothing is intrinsically harmless. Cannabis can be devastating. But I was just sitting here doing work one day, got a hemorrhage in my eye, and lost half the sight in it. Otherwise, I'm supremely healthy. The cause: a gene.
There's always been a pragmatic center on cannabis, especially if you're somewhere where it's legalized.
In Canada, we have legal cannabis.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica...
When it was legalized, there was a documentation push and clear presentation of the downsides. In fact, as above, the language is mostly presented in the negative.
This matches the general sentiment of the broad population.
And let's not conflate things. The article is discussing smoked cannabis. This does not invalidate the essential substance and benefit of the experience. If we remove the ingestion method from the basket of effects, it's a different discussion.
Not all positive, yet smoking is clearly not good for you.
Full stop, no matter what it is.
it's as stupid as smoking/vaping and not even black box warnings will get people to stop
now if you need pain management I can respect that 100%
but you need to investigate Palmitoylethanolamide and Geraniol as alternatives
Yes, people want to recreate, doing all kinds of activities with various levels of risk. They don't need to concern themselves with whether you can respect it.
It seems to me that cannabis users aren’t seeing the benefits of the aforementioned group. My experience of cannabis stoners is that it’s used to numb out and for escapism, which certainly aligns with what you’re saying.
there are far better, legal supplements to treat that anyway, less expensive too
dope activates AMPK in the brain/CNS and turns off AMPK in the body/heart it's an incredibly stupid thing to do to yourself (also why people get "the munchies")
literally why it's called dope (before dope meant "cool")
Marijuana is dirt cheap compared to any prescription medication, at least in the US.
Substances approved by the FDA are done based on specific treatments, with multiple trials and approval per use case
Substances declared scheduled are illegal by the substance itself, instead of per use case
paradoxically because there is no FDA approved use case and almost no way to get one
meaning that places in the US that diverge in legality and are ignored by the federal government have done so without any clinical trial, which would be some level of peer reviewed objective information by use case instead of the whole substance
we can’t even get a simple list of side effects, or a disclaimer about what kind of users shouldn’t use it
only anecdotes
that annoys me and it’s not just about weed
(Literally the person currently responsible for the branch of government that keeps illegal drugs out of the country is an investor in a Kratom company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant
which blocks the receptor that THC binds to and led to weight loss and further improvements of the “metabolic syndrome” beyond weight loss alone. Unfortunately it caused major depression in some people including suicide.
So looking at it that way it would be no surprise that cannabis causes weight gain and metabolic syndrome and in fact my experience is that if I am using cannabis I get a few kg. I think that is the THC and on top of that if you are smoking you are inhaling small particles that turn your blood into sludge (e.g. your blood is a “complex fluid” with cells in it that can be damaged) and doing damage to your lungs and capillaries and promoting inflammation and all that.
Personally I'd wager a bet it's the tobacco and/or smoking that is the harmful part, but it kind of dumbfounds me they failed to account for "details" like "duration and amount of cannabis use", that feels like a very vital thing to control for. Nothing is good for you in too great amounts, even water, so not taking that into account seems to not really give reliable and trustworthy results.
But not all potheads are lazy, and many non-potheads are.
Media tropes sure are great at propagating myths and generating false stigma, which creates a chilling effect for ever correcting the former.
https://thereitis.org/mr-x-by-carl-sagan
Having lived in a country where cannabis has been legal for about a decade now it's quaint seeing this kind of casual disrespect levelled by a stranger.
I wonder if this kind of mindset is still common here and people just don't vocalize it anymore, or if it's the kind of mentality that continued criminalization perpetuates.
Stamp tax it
You should get on some kind of program for your heart though
There was a deliberate effort to demonize weed in the US as it's associated with mexicans, black people, and counterculture, and it's difficult to monetize if it's legal (anyone can just grow it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy_lCjA6poo
Also, there are alternatives to smoking it: use a dry herb vaporizer with no tobacco and you avoid the vast majority of the negative health effects.
Also, title needs a 2025.
> The findings are from a retrospective study of over 4.6 million people published in JACC Advances and a meta-analysis of 12 previously published studies being presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session (ACC.25).
> Kamel and his team conducted the retrospective study using data from TriNetX, a global health research network that provides access to electronic medical records. Their findings indicate that over an average follow-up of over three years, cannabis users had more than a sixfold increased risk of heart attack, fourfold increased risk of ischemic stroke, twofold increased risk of heart failure and threefold increased risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke. All study participants were younger than age 50 and free of significant cardiovascular comorbidities at baseline, with blood pressure and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels within a healthy range and no diabetes, tobacco use or prior coronary artery disease.
> This retrospective cohort study utilized the TriNetX health research network, which aggregates deidentified electronic medical records from health care organizations worldwide.
> 1) The cannabis-user group with cannabis use diagnoses (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision: F12.1, F12.9, F12.90).
You can't expect them to work miracles and come up with data they didn't have. They produced a valuable piece of research furthering our understanding of the cardiovascular risks of cannabis use based on a very large existing dataset that was available to them.
Of course they would love to be able to answer the question of whether smoking is worse for your heart than edibles and so on, and they stated they would like to do this in a future study. But that costs time and money to create an entirely new dataset, and you know what funding for science is like these days.
Still good data, but I don’t think it’s predictive for what cannabis use leads to (unless you assume that taking up cannabis makes you proportionately more likely to also take up whatever the confounding factors were).
After reading the study, do I update the posterior on the hypothesis that cannabis use causes cardiovascular disease to nudge it in the direction that it does? Yes - that's just Bayes' theorem. Does the probability go to 95%+? No, of course not. I'm not claiming otherwise, and it's still useful research.
(Sadly speaking from experience)
Were I to pick a gateway drug into cocaine, it would be alcohol. It becomes a way to infuse more energy in a later night, which is usually one of alcoholic revelry.
When cannabis is just in a store and it's the only thing there, many potheads just stay in the pothead bubble.
> I've smoked cannabis daily for maybe 15 years [...] Visited a cardiologist like two months ago and have perfectly fine heart despite the smoking.
And that was a physical change. Heart attacks happen because of electrocardiac issues as well.
Trust doctors with a grain of salt. There are many bad doctors that market themselves as good doctors, but are in reality terrible providers.
I recently had a scare, where I was encouraged by two separate general practitioners to seek immediate care with an ophthalmologist. I visited the ophthalmologist who I was referred to and they said everything was great, then booked my next appointment for a year out. Four days later, I started losing vision in my right eye.
After visiting a competent ophthalmologist, they were flabbergasted by what the other did. Ten appointments within 2 weeks later with the new specialist and we're undoing the damage that was easily preventable.
In short, some doctors are borderline DANGEROUS, but it's difficult to distinguish them with the ample legal protections they receive.
Anyhow, hope your brother recovered well.
Eeesh...sorry about that. Been there my whole life. It too ten years to get an appointment with a Hematologist and was finally diagnosed with Erythrocytosis which I told them I had but always said my HCT levels were "not really that high". The Hematologist looked at my records and wondered why they did not send me in twenty years ago. I am on Medicare which makes it much more difficult.
> Anyhow, hope your brother recovered well.
My whole family disowned me for no other reason than me having a serious mental illness so I do not care. But thanks.
Yet I only see about .5-1% of the population in my area these days wearing any kind of mask/N95 respirator in public.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XewVicFzRxw&t=152s