Treating High Blood Pressure Without Medications
High blood pressure is known as the “silent killer.”
Rightfully so, according to the CDC, more than 490,000 people die from hypertension and is a $131 billion dollar market in the United States.
There is so much more than meets the eye with high blood pressure and if you are unsure or have questions regarding anything- always consult with your primary care provider.
The Beat Keeps Going
High blood pressure is consequently misrepresented as a salt-induced disease. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Yes, there are SOME salt-sensitive individuals in the world, but a VAST majority of high blood pressure comes from endothelial dysfunction.
That fancy word means that the endothelium (a thin membrane that lines the inside of blood vessels) is responsible for relaxation and contraction of that vessel. It also helps control immune function responses.
We know that the membrane is responsible for immune system responses, just like many other important functions. Why would our blood vessels need an immune-mediated response?
Painting By Numbers is Fun!
Let’s go wayyyyyy back and look at this full circle and see the big picture.
The Standard American Diet (SAD) is made of primarily highly refined carbohydrates that have been significantly processed, changed the chemical structure, and enhanced with genetically modified substances.
These foods include products from gluten, soy, corn, industrial seed oils (omega 6’s), dairy, and pesticides.
Our body is not as stupid as we may think it is. It is CONSTANTLY on the lookout for foreign invaders that could bring undue harm to our system.
When we eat something, our body immediately figures out if it is food that we can benefit from or a foreign invader.
Gluten, soy, corn, industrial seed oils, dairy, and pesticides are FOREIGN INVADERS.
It is our immune system’s response to attack all invaders and rid them from our body. It does this by sending white blood cells (macrophages, leukocytes, T cells) to identify, engulf, and rid the body of the invader.
Picture guerilla warfare happening inside your intestines as this process takes place. Our macrophages are trying to encapsulate and kill these foreign products and do so by any means necessary.
Unfortunately, there can be friendly fire that occurs. This happens when those molecules have landed on our intestinal wall. Constant wear from this encapsulation and destruction process affects the thin layer of our intestines called Zonulin.
Zonulin helps protect the intestinal integrity by keeping the tight junctions in place so no food particles or foreign invaders can get outside of the gastrointestinal tract.
Don’t get me wrong, if this happened overnight we would all be severely ill and wouldn’t be able to function as well as we do. This is a time-consuming process that takes YEARS to develop and manifest symptoms.
Once our body has had enough, it throws in the towel and we start to see the consequences of having free-floating food particles, bacteria and viruses travel throughout our blood and lodge in vital organ tissues.
It never fails, our immune system then recognizes that food particles shouldn’t be in the thyroid gland and sends more soldiers to fight the good fight and get rid of those particles. This causes more cellular and tissue destruction and leads to autoimmunity by way of intestinal permeability.
Thus we create autoimmunity called Hashimotos Thyroiditis.
I hope you can see the big picture that what we eat, has a tremendous downstream effect on the functionality of our vital organs.
Groundhog Day
We tend to wake up and act like nothing is wrong and keep doing what we are doing until something is broken.
Why not take initiative and mitigate your chances of developing a chronic disease or autoimmunity?
Well, this chemical warfare doesn’t just stop in our organ tissues. Remember me saying that it leaks out from the intestines and goes into our bloodstream as a transporter?
When it is in our bloodstream, it doesn’t get a free pass. Our immune system is active there too and it sends soldiers to help fight foreign invaders there.
Our body fights the good fight constantly from what we eat.
This is where our endothelial dysfunction comes into play. The lining of the vessel recognizes that there should not be poop particles, food particles, and so on in our blood vessel so it sends more soldiers to the area of recognition to fight those pathogens.
The blood vessels are under a constant state of attack and what happens when our immune system comes into play?
We get inflammation and swelling in the area.
Think about what happens when we have an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite. Our skin becomes red, inflamed, irritated, and angry.
A very similar reaction takes place INSIDE our blood vessels when an immune response takes place. Inflammation occurs and it causes RESTRICTION in our blood vessels.
I just took you from a very 30,000-foot view to a micro-level understanding of what takes place inside our body when we eat food that we aren’t supposed to eat.
Gather ‘Round Children, It Is Story Time
So.
We know that eating INFLAMMATORY foods causes an immune response. We know our immune response is programmed to create INFLAMMATION to help fight the offender. We know that repeated exposure to the offender causes chronic disease and autoimmunity to develop.
Having this knowledge in place, we should all be very clear that what we eat is the root cause of the vast majority of the problems we see in our world today.
Remember, that food is ALWAYS the best medicine.
First of all, if you are STRICT with your dietary habits, to those I have expressed above, I guarantee that your blood pressure will decrease.
Not only that, you will lose weight, have more energy, feel younger, look younger, your skin will glow, your libido will increase, your risk of metabolic disease DRASTICALLY decreases, cardiac risk decreases, stomach upset will dissipate, and you will be one healthy individual.
If by some small margin of the population, you continue to have high blood pressure, I have the answer for you.
Only if we have eliminated the endothelial dysfunction involved with our immune system based on the foods we eat, we can focus on nitric oxide potentiation.
Nitric oxide is a potent vasodilator (makes the arteries open up) and as we age that number drastically decreases in our periphery. As a result, it makes our heart work harder against smaller vessels, thus causing the heart to grow.
The heart is the only muscle in our body that we don’t want to get bigger because it decreases the ability to pump effectively as a result.
Imagine you trying to squeeze a grapefruit for its juice in your hand versus a lime. The grapefruit will naturally be harder to squeeze because of its large size. The lime is significantly smaller and therefore we will have a more impactful squeeze to get its juice.
The same concept applies to the heart. The bigger it is, the harder it is to squeeze the blood. However, if it is normal, it is much easier to force the blood throughout our body.
Mommy Nature
Now we have eliminated the causative factor with food and our pressure is still high we can help increase our nitric oxides levels naturally by eating beets or taking beetroot powder.
If beets aren’t your jam, don’t worry- they aren’t mine either, then we can use supplements like the following:
1) Taurine
2) Neo40
3) L-Arginine
4) Carnitine
5) D-Ribose
6) COQ10
7) Magnesium Glycinate
8) Vitamin D
9) B complex
Also, understand that a majority of those vitamins and minerals are in animal proteins like red meat. It’s crazy that mother nature has always provided the answer to our issues, we just have a hard time listening.
Please, please, PLEASE do your research with these supplements and understand YOU are accountable for what YOU put in your body.
My goal is to provide educational resources for YOU to look into and understand the benefits that they can provide to your body.
The number one curative agent, of course, is food. Nothing beats a lifestyle modification that includes a healthy diet, exercise, natural sunlight, and proper supplementation.
Be strong. Be brave.
