Restricting SUGAR lowers high blood pressure….

Today's post: Thursday, 8-28-2008

As some of you read in our earlier posts, we are about to publish an eBook that reveals the methods that have been tested to work to lower high blood pressure & that do NOT use drugs.

(We'll announce that here when it's ready.)

One of the really nice things about these methods is that virtually all of them also provide abundant protection to your health in addition to lowering high blood pressure. That way you get both the lower blood pressure AND the health protection that you are trying to lower your blood pressure to achieve.

(This will also help many people to avoid the nasty side effects of the drugs that lower high blood pressure.)

And, in several places we recommend that you avoid high glycemic & fattening foods & nonfoods such as high fructose corn syrup, refined grain foods, and to minimize eating real sugar. We also strongly recommend avoiding most commercially produced snacks & baked goods that are made from those foods.

This protects your health. And just from the lower amount of excess fat you’ll carry, it will lower your blood pressure compared with what it would be if you kept eating this stuff.

We also point out that you need to take action to protect your health & lower the readings if your fasting glucose goes over 99 or your HBA1C goes over about 5.8. And we give methods that work to do this including the foods to avoid just listed.

And, we also list the abundant evidence that shows that eating a lot of fruit and vegetables that are high in potassium and taking enough magnesium PLUS keeping total salt to about 1500 mg a day lowers blood pressure effectively.

Doing that set of things even lowers blood pressure a bit in people with OK readings in the 120 over 80 range. And, it definitely lowers blood pressure that’s high and helps keep your blood pressure from going up.

In addition, about 30 percent of black people in the Americas whose ancestors survived coming to the Americas without adequate water to drink during their voyage and 10 or 15 percent of other groups are salt sensitive. And for all those people, salt restriction is even more effective and important to protect their health and keep their blood pressure at desirable levels.

It’s also worth noting that the commercially produced snacks & baked goods that are made from refined grains and sugar and high fructose corn syrup that we suggest lowering to keep your blood sugar levels down also contain enough salt that avoiding them can cut the salt intake by more than half in many people who still eat them now & who stop eating them.

So, as you can see, we do suggest limiting salt because of these facts. But we also suggest limiting sugar & eliminating refined grains & the junky foods made from them.

We did not however, have the information that limiting sugar & eliminating refined grains & the junky foods made from them directly lowers blood pressure also.

That made me intensely interested an article in last Tuesday’s Total Health Breakthroughs.

It not only says that lowering sugars and other high glycemic carbohydrates lowers blood pressure directly and effectively, it has evidence this may be even more important to do than restricting salt for many people.

(By the way, restricting salt has such a strong track record, we still recommend restricting salt in addition to restricting excessive sugar & high glycemic carbohydrates. It helps that the commercially made snacks and baked goods we suggest hardly ever eating have both.)

Here’s the article itself.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription,
visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com"

Rethinking Sodium Restriction for High Blood Pressure

By Laura LaValle, RD, LD

If you have high blood pressure, you more than likely have been told to try to lose weight and to reduce your sodium intake. But have you ever been told to reduce your sugar and starch intake? More than likely you haven't. In fact, some people in the medical community believe that it's a myth that high carb intake can contribute to insulin resistance and high blood pressure. What a disappointment.

Many studies over the last decade have shown improvements in blood pressure as a byproduct of low carb diets. However, not many studies have looked specifically at blood pressure as an endpoint on a low carb diet. One study completed in 2003 and reported to the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists in 2006, found that changing the diet to reduce insulin secretion resulted in a drop in diastolic blood pressure (the lower number) from 96 to 88.5 mmHg after six weeks.1-2

The diet used in this study was a low carb, high fat and animal protein diet. The only dietary restriction was sugar and starch, the two food groups that elicit the highest insulin secretion. There was no calorie or sodium restriction on the diet.

Although the study's lead researcher stated that they discouraged the participants from consuming too many high sodium processed meats like hot dogs and bacon, some participants ignored that advice and in so doing were consuming as many as 20 grams of sodium per day. (Current medical guidelines are to try to eat no more than 2.3 grams [2300 mg] of sodium per day.)

Despite increased sodium intake, blood pressure came down, and that's not the only thing. Fasting blood glucose and insulin, triglycerides, and VLDL all came down -- and there was an average of 12 pounds of weight loss. And finally, there were positive effects on LDL -- the particle size increased. (Larger particle size LDL is not as likely to become plaque in the arteries as small particle LDL.)

Participants were all patients who were overweight, had elevated blood pressure and blood sugar, and were considered to be at very high risk for heart disease and strokes. By the end of the six weeks, some patients were able to stop their high blood pressure and blood sugar medications altogether, and others were able to reduce their dosages.

This finding led the authors to conclude that medicine needs to stop paying so much attention to sodium and more attention to insulin as the cause of high blood pressure. You would think that news like this would travel fast, yet I have found that almost no one has heard of it.

Those of you who regularly read my husband Jim's and my articles, know that we are big advocates for low carb diets. I just want you to know that in reducing your carb intake, you are not only choosing a diet that is good for your weight, your lipids, and blood sugar, you are benefiting from one of the most powerful ways to reduce blood pressure as well. And by making that change you don't need to be nearly as strict with the salt shaker.

References

Abdul-Rahman, M et al. Abstract 201, Endocr Pract. 2006; 12(Suppl. 2), 50.
Hays JH et al. Mayo Clin Proc. 2003:78; 1331-1336.

[Ed. Note: Laura B. LaValle, RD, LD is presently the director of dietetics nutrition at LaValle Metabolic Institute (formerly part of Living Longer Institute). She offers personal nutritional counseling at LMI for clients who need help with their diet in relation to illness or disease. Laura also provides educational services in the areas of health promotion, wellness, and disease prevention…..]”

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This is good news indeed in many respects.

But the important news is how effective lowering bad carbs turned out to be in lowering high blood pressure.

I’ve not seen the study but the average reduction they got in the “diastolic blood pressure (the lower number) from 96 to 88.5” suggests that as a group these people started at about 162 over 96 and wound up at about 151 over 89.

That’s still too high for the best health protection, which is why we recommend salt restriction and several other methods to get further reductions as well.

But it does produce enough of an improvement it may help many of these people avoid or get off of blood pressure drugs.

Virtually all doctors will write a prescription for blood pressure drugs if they see readings of 162 over 96 & above. Research shows this lowers death rates. So that’s as it should be.

But they hope to get the resulting blood pressure to 150 over 80 or below with the drugs. So 151 over 89 is close enough to that, they may be a good bit more willing to have someone with those readings or a bit less work at lowering them without drugs.

And, all these these improvements reported in this study are extremely heart protective.

Eating a diet with at least moderate levels of health OK protein foods and fats including whole eggs, wild caught fish, beef fed only grass, and extra virgin olive oil & avocados is one good way to get or keep high HDL levels. Though the fats and protein foods in this study may not have been as good for the people as that, they probably did at least maintain or increase their HDL levels.

And, combining that with the lower triglycerides reported in this study is direct proof that the amount of the heart harmful small particle LDL they had in their blood went down.

So, that improvement plus the lower blood pressure means that the low carb diet did indeed improve their protection from heart attacks and strokes.

That’s nice to know.