Ed Hinerman On Life Insurance

Don’t Talk To Me About This Before I’ve Had My Coffee!!

Ahh, my morning cup of coffee! And the second one. Now we’re talking….maybe a bit too fast, but we are definitely talking. It’s fun to watch the cudos and cabashes that coffee takes. It’s a rare month that goes by when coffee isn’t credited for or blamed for something.

Most recently coffee has been lumped in with soft drinks as a problem for those with diabetes. The claim is that glucose levels go up with caffeine intake. That kind of blew my first thought. I figured they were going to dive off into those “wanna be” coffee drinkers who really don’t do anything more than turn their cup of sugar a light brown color.

But it is the caffeine in coffee, soft drinks and tea that is the culprit. While those with diabetes are looking for control, the study results don’t indicate that caffeine intake is the biggest culprit by any stretch of the imagination. The blind study used placebos interspersed with capsules that contained the caffeine equivalent of 4 cups of coffee. Two things come to mind if I am going to defend my coffee drinking habit. First, not that many people drink 4 cups a day, and second, if you take a capsule that has a 4 cup equivalent, it seems like that is more like guzzling 4 cups than having those cups over the course of a morning or a day.

Bottom line. Life insurance underwriters like to see control as measured by your fasting glucose and your hbA1c. While a heavy coffee drinker might want to consider this cautionary study, for most a lifestyle of good diet and exercise, keeping weight under control and avoiding extremes of just about anything will get you where you need to go. Life insurance rates don’t have to be off the charts as long as you are compliant with treatment and have the controlled glucose that should be the result of that.

Add comment January 31st, 2008

High Blood Pressure And Smoking!

Smoking is often touted by those who partake as a way to calm themselves. Of course, from a life insurance standpoint, calm or not, smoking carries so much health baggage with it that rates for smokers are dramatically higher than non smokers.

A recent study suggests that the feeling of calmness may be deceiving as women seem to have a significantly increased risk of high blood pressure (hypertension) if they smoke. Along with that increased risk comes the risk of heart disease.

We have discussed many times that blood pressure and cholesterol are the two most common surprises on insurance exams. Hypertension isn’t called the silent killer for no reason. Especially if it is borderline or mildly elevated, a person may not notice the symptoms, or it may come on over a period of time and it just blends in and a person doesn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

The good news is that blood pressure is often easily controlled by lifestyle changes, and in the absence of the ability to make that change, also easily controlled with medication. Certainly a change to not smoking is going to have benefits across the board. After 12 months of no nicotine use, life insurance rates can be cut in half or more.

Bottom line. High blood pressure is just one more reason to consider giving up on smoking. The list of health issues connected to smoking is constantly growing. The truth is that there are no benefits to it, only downsides.

1 comment January 31st, 2008