New ways to turn off gout and high blood pressure....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-21-2012

Introduction:

There were two stories early this week about the relationship between excess salt intake and endothelial dysfunction (damage or irritation or inflammation of the inner surface of your blood vessels) and uric acid levels.

The research apparently was done by researchers, from Harvard Medical School and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and one report of it was from or similar research was done at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

First, the importance of this news for turning off or preventing heart disease and high blood pressure.:

I’d always heard that excess salt caused high blood pressure in people who had ancestors who survived lack of water in hot conditions, mostly black people living in the United States.

I’d read that excess salt combined with lack of other electrolytes such as magnesium and potassium caused higher blood pressure.  And I’d heard that there was some direct effect by excess sodium causing water retention and the extra water in the blood vessels causing high blood pressure.

I think those things are still true.  People who have normal blood pressure who adopt the low salt DASH II diet have slightly lower blood pressure after doing so for example.

But this study established something else.  They say they found that:

“Excessive salt intake can damage blood vessels” directly!

They further explain that “individuals with a high, long-term sodium intake tended to have greater uric acid and albumin levels - both of which are known markers of blood vessel damage.“

And, it seems when endothelial (blood vessel inner surface) damage was greater as measured by “levels of albumin and uric acid” in the blood, continuing a high salt intake was far more likely to cause enough rise in blood pressure to make it too high.

How does that translate into “New ways to turn off gout and high blood pressure”?

It can be harmful to get LESS than the 1500 mg or so of sodium allowed by the DASH II diet and people who sweat a lot on hot days may need a bit more sodium on those days. 

Also, although there are many ways to spice foods to taste good that do work, those foods that need some salt to taste good, simply taste flat and depleted without any salt at all or too little of it.  (Early on, some restaurants that tried to serve health OK foods but that overdid salt restriction failed because those kinds of foods simply didn’t taste good enough.)

BUT, this research shows that an every day intake of salt in the 3,500 to 7,000 mg a day range is a DIRECT cause of heart disease AND, over time, a direct cause of high blood pressure.

That by itself is extremely important news.

It means that the sources of excess salt in salty snacks, many prepared foods, most restaurant and fast foods, some prepackaged dinners, and some canned foods is best avoided from totally to almost all of the time.

It also shows that if you avoid the other causes of endothelial dysfunction and heart disease and/or do the things that improve endothelial dysfunction you can safely have a bit more salt than only 1500 mg -- though over 3500 mg is still directly harmful.

In addition to the many ways that you can prevent heart disease and endothelial damage that we just posted on Tuesday, 6-12, a few days ago, and have often posted on before, you can ease the symptoms of endothelial dysfunction and sometimes lower high blood pressure. 

You do this by taking the amino acids l-arginine or taking l-arginine with some l-citrulline on an empty stomach since doing so causes nitric oxide release and causes your blood vessels to relax a bit and become more flexible. 

Also taking l-lysine on an empty stomach at a different time of day helps prevent the extra arginine from causing viruses that like it from causing you extra problems.  Even better, taking l-lysine on an empty stomach -- and one researcher found that adding l-proline and extra vitamin C -- helps entirely prevent endothelial dysfunction by making the surface of your blood vessels stronger, tougher, and more resilient.

Doing these things can help lower high blood pressure and keep it from getting worse -- and in men who have ED caused by endothelial dysfunction, it can improve things a good bit.

So if you want to avoid heart disease and high blood pressure avoid excess salt and the foods that contain it:

Eat raw or dry roasted nuts instead of salted nuts.  And virtually never buy salted nuts.  Avoid virtually all chips and salty snacks.  Read labels on prepared foods and canned foods & avoid the ones high in salt.  Usually avoid fast food.  And, in restaurants lean towards small servings of foods that are salted. 

When you cook, learn the ways that work to make foods taste good without salt and use them. 

Extra virgin olive oil, minced fresh garlic, powdered garlic, diced raw onions, diced sautéed onions, and all the other savory food spices from basil to turmeric and more in different blends work.  Finally, some kinds of shredded or shredded and diced parmesan cheese taste really salty but actually have less salt than their taste suggests.

When you use salt in your cooking, use a bit less.  (By all means suggest that people who want it a bit saltier add a bit at the table.)

And when you eat, ALWAYS taste the food first BEFORE you add salt and then add just a bit and don’t add more until after you taste. 

Also, consider adopting the DASH II diet or a blend of it with the Mediterranean diet, doing so has dramatic other benefits too from fat loss to preventing heart disease in other ways.

How this may be huge news for turning off gout:

It’s not at all widely known that higher levels of uric acid are a marker for and caused in part by endothelial damage and the related development of heart disease.

Nor, until this research, was it known or at all well known that excessive salt intake directly caused endothelial damage.

People with gout have known to stop overindulging in large servings of fatty meat and drinking too many alcoholic drinks too often.

Eating celery and taking celery seed extract helps. So does eating cherries or even canned, pitted sour cherries with no sugar added.  And drinking real cherry juice and taking cherry extracts helps some people quite a bit.

And, eating fewer foods high in purines helps. Besides fatty meats, WebMD lists, “Foods with the highest purine content include liver, organ, and game meats, sardines, mussels, anchovies, herring, and beer.”

The great news of this study is that literally everything else you can do to prevent heart disease or lessen endothelial dysfunction ALSO turns down gout!

That virtually quadruples the leverage you can have for getting rid of gout beyond what was known before!

One doctor, David Blyweiss, had this as added ways to lessen gout in a recent email:

"Turmeric and Curcumin: All forms of arthritis, including gout, are responsive to turmeric or curcumin for ongoing pain management with no side effects. You can take 1000 mg of curcumin, twice a day and 300 mg. 3 times a day of a standardized extract of turmeric. Or better yet, find a blend of the two specially-formulated for arthritis sufferers. With flare ups, you can increase the curcumin to 3,000 mg. twice a day safely and up to 500 mg. 3 times a day of turmeric.

Vitamin C: Another supplement shown to cut gout risk is vitamin C. A 20-year study of almost 47,000 men shows that as vitamin C increases in men's diets, the risk of gout decreases. In the study, 1,500 mg. of vitamin C a day reduced the risk of gout in men by 45%"

Turmeric and curcumin are powerful anti-inflammatories and vitamin C is a strong antioxidant.

But turmeric and curcumin also lower the kind of LDL that causes harm to your blood vessels and vitamin C makes them stronger.

So this new research validates his two extra methods!

But it also means that you can add stopping salty snacks and other sources of excess salt to the list of things that prevent gout or turn it down.

You can take the amino acids we listed above to improve the health of your arteries which looks likely to lower uric acid levels too.

You can add avoiding tobacco smoke totally. That avoids what may well be the very worst cause of endothelial damage and therefore the biggest direct cause of gout.

You can add no longer eating refined grains and high fructose corn syrup or eating too much sugar.

You can add no longer eating anything from shortening to nondairy creamer to pie crusts made with shortening to commercial baked goods like cookies made with hydrogenated oils.

You can use extra virgin olive oil instead of ever using high omega 6 oils like soy and corn oil and stop eating foods in which these cheap oils are used.

You can be sure to get regular exercise most days of every week once the gout is turned down enough.

You can add no longer drinking any regular or diet soft drinks.

Of course doing those things also prevents heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and fast aging!

Not only that, you will find it much easier to lose excess fat and keep it off.

But until now, that very large list of things was NOT yet known to prevent gout or turn it down or off.

So, if you have gout or know anyone who does, tell them about this news and this post.

We now know, thanks to this research, how to get something like TEN times the leverage on preventing gout and turning it down or off than was commonly known as recently as a couple of weeks ago!