Lower high blood pressure without drugs....

Today's Post: Friday, 9-3-2010

Earlier this week, one of my health emails said it had 9 ways to lower high blood pressure naturally.

This is a very important topic for health because many of the nondrug methods to lower high blood pressure also directly provide the health protection that your doctor is hoping to give you with the drugs.

In fact, if you take the drugs and don’t use the nondrug methods, lowering your blood pressure with the drugs alone provides from less to no protection to your health. Some of the drugs even harm your health besides.

Much to my surprise, this email listed fewer than 9 ways to do that. In fact, in some ways it could be said to only have three.

Practice an effective stress relief routine.

Take certain supplements that lower high blood pressure.

And, try acupuncture.

The good news is that their first two methods were pretty good.

1. The first one listed Tai Chi. For lowering high blood pressure, tai chi is most effective for most people. You do have to learn to do one or more of the multipart exercises or routines & do a few minutes each day. But you get multiple benefits.

Daily practice in people with high blood pressure lowered their blood pressure by 17 over 11.

That’s better than meditation and the Resperate device for lowering high blood pressure. Even better, it improves your coordination and every minute you do Tai Chi is exercise & burns about as many calories as walking. It also strengthens and adds muscle to your legs and lower back. In fact, that level of blood pressure reduction is better than most of the drugs to lower high blood pressure can give you.

Many people who have been appalled and unwilling to continue high blood pressure drugs due to their often severe impact on your quality of life and the health risks some of them have, have been able to stop taking the drugs once they had been doing Tai Chi for a few weeks.

2. Their supplement list was decent also. But it was incomplete and listed the less effective form of the most effective supplement.

What I’ll do here is to list the effective form of the most effective supplement & then list the other supplements by category.

The most effective supplement by itself is ubiquinol, which is by far the most effective version of CoQ10. 100 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10 was found to lower high blood pressure by about 16 over 10.

But you will get better results with ubiquinol. When you take CoQ10, your body turns some of it into ubiquinol. By taking the ubiquinol form to begin with, your blood level of the effective version, ubiquinol, increases faster, goes to a higher level, and of most importance, your blood level stays high far longer than by taking CoQ10. It also helps that you only need a fourth to an eighth as much in mg of ubiquinol to do the job compared to CoQ10.

Some people will get strong blood pressure lowering from 50 mg of ubiquinol only once a day while others will need more like 100 mg of ubiquinol two or three times a day.

Like Tai Chi, many people who have been appalled and unwilling to continue high blood pressure drugs due to their often severe impact on your quality of life and the health risks some of them have, have been able to stop taking the drugs once they had been taking CoQ10 or ubiquinol for a few weeks.

3. Lose weight. If you have many pounds of excess fat -- and high blood pressure, if you then lose all the excess fat, you have a good chance of losing all the high blood pressure as well.

One man I knew gained 60 pounds and developed high blood pressure. He was, fortunately for him, able to lose the 60 pounds successfully and was delighted to find his blood pressure was no longer high.

This is quite common. There are three reasons for this.

Having all that extra fat weight causes your heart to have to work harder and tighten your blood vessels to ensure your blood circulates properly.

Second, many of the upgrades to what you eat and drink that are necessary to lose excess fat successfully also directly lower high blood pressure.

Third, the exercises besides Tai Chi that are necessary to do to lose excess fat successfully also directly lower high blood pressure.

But here is a major reason to use these nondrug methods instead of drugs as well. Many of the drugs to lower high blood pressure make the people taking them weaker and decrease their energy level while others simply cause you to tend to gain more fat.

This drag on your ability to do one of the most effective things you can do to lower your blood pressure and protect your health to me is an unacceptable side effect.

4. The DASH II diet or a version of the Mediterranean diet with less pasta and very little salt both lower high blood pressure and directly protect your health.

They also help many people lose weight and excess fat. The reason is pretty simple. They contain NO regular or diet soft drinks or packaged snacks or commercially prepared desserts and virtually no foods made of refined grain or which are heavily sugared or salted. They both have very little fatty and grain fed meat. And, they both have a large variety of nonstarchy vegetables.

In addition, they have virtually no oils high in omega 6 while they both favor wild caught fish and the Mediterranean diet uses olive oil instead.

Compared to what many Americans with high blood pressure have been eating or drinking, these ways of eating tend to lower high blood pressure about 12 over 8 if you follow them close to 100 % of the time when you switch to eating that way.

5. The salt restricted DASH II version of the DASH diet even lowers blood pressure in people who do not have high blood pressure.

But in addition to eating a LOT less salt and the junk food that contains hidden salt, you can add MORE of the competing electrolyte minerals that tend to LOWER high blood pressure.

You can get this effect by taking 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium, taking 297 mg a day of potassium and eating the vegetables and fruit in these two diets that are high in potassium—and by eating foods high in calcium.

a) Be careful NOT to overdo magnesium. If you take it as a supplement, don’t also take daily doses of it as a laxative too. More than 1,000 mg a day can be harmful; and there are other kinds of laxatives that work.

The really great news is that magnesium also has some direct high blood pressure lowering effect as it acts in way similar to a calcium blocker drug in addition to reducing the blood pressure increase effects of the sodium you take in.

b) People who are taking some of the diuretic high blood pressure drugs can run into problems if they also boost their potassium levels plus getting the potassium in foods that protect your health also is better for you than taking potassium as a supplement. So the largest dose of potassium is limited at 99 mg.

So consider taking some as a supplement but get most of your potassium from fruits and vegetables.

The best news is that potassium is the mineral that most directly competes with sodium. And, it’s been found that when you limit sodium to the 1500 mg a day in the DASH II diet and increase potassium, your blood pressure will go down.

c) Calcium, it has recently been found out, is a BAD supplement to take. In supplement form it goes into your blood too fast and apparently winds up calcifying the lining of your blood vessels causing or worsening heart disease.

Getting the same amount of calcium in food, which gives it more of a time release delivery, has none of this side effect. The DASH II diet includes nonfat and very lowfat dairy in part for the protein and B12 you miss by cutting back on fatty, grain fed meat; but it also delivers plenty of calcium.

Some seaweeds and vegetables have calcium as do beans and lentils and canned, wild caught salmon cooked with the bones.

Lastly, it has recently been found that taking calcium supplements for bone protection is less effective than getting calcium in food and taking 2,000 iu a day or more of vitamin D3.

6. Eat and take supplements of foods that release nitric oxide in your blood vessels. This causes the walls of your blood vessels to relax and increases blood flow.

That protects your health, lowers your blood pressure, and can help improve your sex life.

Taking 500 mg to 2500 mg a day of l-arginine has this effect. Since it also increases growth hormone, taking it just before you exercise and just before bed – both on an empty stomach, has extra benefits. You’ll age more slowly and add more muscle from your exercises which helps fat loss.

Eating raw or dry roasted nuts also helps if you aren’t allergic. They are high in arginine. (They also are high in magnesium and have some calcium. Eating them increases your HDL that protects your heart. And, eating nuts instead of fatty grain fed meat or junk food snacks also helps protect your health by helping you cut back on those.)

Taking 100 to 300 mg a day of grape seed extract has been shown to lower high blood pressure by up to 12 over 8. And, I recently found out this is largely due to the nitric oxide release it gives you.

I’m out of time today, so this will be continued in a part 2 next week.

But just this group of methods will enable many people to lower their high blood pressure enough to avoid drugs or safely stop taking them.

(Note that high blood pressure drugs must be stopped gradually for it to be as safe as it should be. For many of them, if you simply stop cold, there is a rebound effect that can cause dangerous blood pressure increases. So, instead of going from 3 doses a day to zero, go to 2 a day for a week and then one a day for a week and then one every other day for a week & THEN go to zero.)

Tuesday Sept 7 next week we’ll have part 2 with supplements that can reduce high blood pressure more when added to these methods.

And, you’ll see there is some overlapping of these methods too. Many of them benefit you in more than one category each time you do them.