10 ways to lower blood pressure. Naturally, today I'm going to talk about some of the myths and misconceptions around blood pressure so that you understand how it works. That way, you don't have to waste time and get lost in the details that are not going to help.
The 10 ways I'm going to talk about are straight from the internet. This is from the mayo clinic. These were their top ten ways to control blood pressure without medication. So we're going to discuss them.
Some of them are really good, but they'd never explain why they work, and some of them are not so good because they don't understand how it works. I recently did a video on blood pressure where I laid out some more of the foundation and today we're going to dig into some more detail around that, first of all, just to get back to the basics. Normal blood pressure is 120 to 180. That is optimal for most people, but there are some natural variations, so anywhere from 120 to 140 could be normal for you, but it's still a good idea to understand so that if your blood pressure is starting to go up that you know it might indicate something.
We know that blood pressure over 180 is a crisis. You want to get help as soon as possible, but we're going to put this in perspective. We also know that during exercise, your blood pressure can get up to 220 and that's totally normal.
Why does that happen? How can the body compensate and manage that number one on their list to lower blood pressure is to lose weight and watch your belly fat? So it's again this advice that we hear over and over and all vermin. Why is that? Why would that be helpful? And it's not because the belly fat is causing anything it's that the belly fat is a result of something destructive, namely insulin resistance. So if you reduce insulin resistance, then you lose weight and your blood pressure typically comes down the good way.
The right way of reducing insulin resistance is low, carb intermittent fasting and keto. As we talked about on this channel. That way, you reduce your cravings.
You reduce your hunger and your satiety levels. Go up. You eat less because your insulin resistance is going down.
Now you lose weight, and your blood pressure comes down, but it's not the weight. That is it's the fact that you are d congesting, your body number to exercise regularly. This is great advice, but what's the mechanism? Why does that work? Well? Exercise is the number one stimulant for your brain. Your brain is what ultimately manages your blood pressure.
As we said, blood pressure is a variable. It is being regulated and controlled and managed every moment of your life. So if we can help the brain get into better balance, it's going to help manage your blood pressure. Better exercise is 90 % of the signals of the activation that keeps your brain alive.
So when you exercise it's like you turn up, the dimmer switch. All the way on your brain and when the brain's dimmer switch is all the way up when your frontal lobe is lit up bright. Now it has all that power to inhibit stress is what raises blood sugar.
The frontal lobe is, what reduces stress and exercise is what drives the frontal lobe. So exercise is going to activate the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is going to inhibit your sympathetic nervous system or your stress, that's why exercise works right because, during the exercise, you're going to drive your blood pressure higher and higher and higher, because that's appropriate during those circumstances. So it's not the exercise that lowers it.
It's the exercise that stimulates the frontal lobe that helps the brain gets healthier, and now you have better control of your stress responses. Number three eating a healthy diet, great advice, but what is a healthy diet? Okay, that's the big conundrum and, unfortunately, this being off of the mayo clinic site. A healthy diet to them is something that promotes insulin resistance, it's going to be 60 65 % carbohydrate up to 150 grams of sugar per day in the terms of added sugar, lactose and fructose.
So that's why they believe that prediabetes always leads to diabetes, because with that diet it does so yes, eat a healthy diet, but don't follow the guidelines. The high carbohydrate, because that's going to increase your insulin resistance and that's why they think all these things are irreversible. Number four reduces sodium and here's a big one. This is maybe the biggest misconception, the biggest myth of all when it comes to blood pressure.
You hear that all the time, but probably no one is unaware of that advice that lower your sodium intake, here's how it actually works. We're going to look at a little bit bigger picture here. So let's assume that you start with balanced blood pressure.
You start with balance in your body and then you eat a bunch of salt. Salt is sodium, also known as an atrium and in some languages, you eat sodium binds to water. So now you, the sodium, is pulling water to it. It makes the blood increase in volume, so it's swell you're your total blood volume.
Therefore, the blood pressure goes up so far that the reasoning makes sense that sodium causes high blood pressure, but what they don't take into consideration is one of the most powerful principles in your physiology. It's called pressure, diuresis, as in diuretics, that's the drug. They give you to drive fluids out of your body to force the body to go beyond what it wants to do and get rid of fluids.
That's called diuresis and that will lower your blood pressure, but the body already has a mechanism to do that. Unless something else overrides it, so we have all this sequence: blood pressure goes up, then the pressure diuresis means that a relatively small increase in blood pressure resulting from increased blood volume is going to result in a relatively larger diuresis, getting rid of water and sodium. So you get back to balance and then you eat more sodium.
Your water goes up. Your blood pressure goes up, but even a tiny little bit of increase in blood pressure is going to push that water out through the kidneys. So the kidneys have a mechanism that when the salt is higher, then the body wants it.
Then it has a powerful mechanism to get rid of that sodium and if it doesn't get rid of that sodium, according to the pressure diuresis principle that it's because something is overriding it okay, so sometimes it's appropriate to maintain higher blood pressure and then it kicks out. It overrides that pressure diuresis, so when it's appropriate to have high blood pressure is either, if you're, in real stress or what's more commonly in perceived stress, but either way. There is a perception that overrides this mechanism.
Your body knows how to get rid of the sodium when it wants to when it's supposed to so. Let's ask this question: if a slight increase in blood pressure is going to create diuresis, meaning that you create a lot of urine output, then how come you can exercise and get your blood pressure all the way up to 220, almost double your blood pressure and not Pee yourself, every time you go running or exercising, because if the body didn't have compensatory mechanisms, then that would happen every time you exercised. Okay, you'd have to exercise with diapers. There would be no way around it, but the point is the body: has all these different systems to compensate to create the right amount of blood pressure depending on the situation and when you're exercising high blood pressure is appropriate.
So it's going to override the pressure diuresis you're, going to maintain that blood volume, even though the blood pressure is very high and again it's the brain that does this so at rest when the stress is over, the frontal lobe is supposed to inhibit your stress. You are sympathetic or your fight-flight system, but during exercise, the fight-flight system is appropriate. That's what fuels your body so now the frontal lobe is going to drive that sympathy.
It's going to increase the fight-flight response going to increase your heart rate, increase your blood pressure, so you can produce all of that fuel delivery to the muscles, and now it sends a signal to the pituitary to make a hormone called angiotensin 2 and that angiotensin 2 also produces stimulates a hormone called antidiuretic hormone, so these two hormones put together says during exercise. We need really high blood pressure, but we don't want any of that water to leak out through the kidneys. The reason that you have high blood pressure is not because of the sodium, and because of all this advice, then there are more people who are deficient in sodium. There are people who have too low a blood volume.
They can't keep their blood pressure up rather the opposite. Another thing about salt and kidneys. What fascinates me when it's being when salt is being called evil at every turn, is the fact that the kidneys actually filter out about 250 litres of fluid every day.
But you only get rid of your only void about one and a half litre, so 97, 98 per cent of the fluid gets reabsorbed and, along with that, fluid the body also reabsorbs the sodium, because sodium is such a precious nutrient. It is our most important signalling mineral. In the body, so it doesn't seem to me like the body if it has the ability to get rid of sodium at will and it absorbs and reabsorbs 97 per cent of the sodium. Why would it do that? If sodium was a bad thing? Alright doesn't make sense.
Now, if you have kidney failure, if, other parts of your system are so damaged, that they no longer have the ability to regulate this now, salt can make your blood pressure worse. But we're talking about a very, very small percentage of people and if you have kidney failure, yes restrict your sodium. If you don't, then don't worry about it number five way to lower blood pressure limit alcohol. So again, that's a great idea and then they go on to say that in small doses, such as one to two drinks a day, alcohol actually helps lower blood pressure.
But in larger doses, with two or more drinks a day, it actually makes blood pressure worse. So why is that? Well again, one to two drinks help you relax, it helps you have less stress and stress is what brings up the blood pressure. It helps your brain relax. It helps calm down your sympathetic, nervous system.
That's why it works, but if you have a lot of drinks, if you start drinking multiple drinks every day now, you're moving toward fatty, liver and insulin resistance, because alcohol also acts like a lump of sugar, even though it doesn't drive blood sugar per se, it kind of Acts like a cube of sugar in the body. I tell people that less is always better if you're going to drink have one to two drinks and give yourself at least two days a week without any drinking number, six quit smoking great advice. But why does that work? We touched on this in the previous video because smokers block their oxygen, carrying capacity when they breathe in the carbon monoxide that blocks the red blood cell haemoglobin. So they don't have the ability to carry oxygen as well as a nonsmoker.
So now the body has to increase its effort at fuel delivery. It has to increase heart rate, increase blood pressure to deliver more blood because each unit of blood has less oxygen. So if you quit smoking, then you have more access to oxygen and your blood pressure goes down.
Number seven reduces caffeine, so caffeine is a form of stress. It has the same effect on the body as adrenaline. It fits into the same type of receptor as adrenaline, which is a vasoconstrictor.
So yes, in most cases, caffeine will have a direct effect on blood pressure, but in a healthy person, that's not a problem because it doesn't create the circumstances behind blood pressure. It's a temporary signal that, while you have that caffeine, your blood pressure is going to be a few points higher, but it doesn't create a problem in itself unless you have weak adrenals or if your stress level is such that you kind of blow it out of Proportion by adding just a little bit of caffeine so watch how that works. For you for most people, it's not a problem, because it's a temporary effect that doesn't affect any root causes.
It doesn't worsen any root causes unless you have adrenal problems. The number 8 way to reduce blood pressure is to reduce stress. So absolutely stress is the perception that the body needs more resources and it's going to increase blood pressure and block out rate to deliver more fuel to the body to deal with the stress.
So that's a good thing, however, when they talk about reducing the stress they're. Talking about avoiding stressful situations, and that's not what reducing stress is about because the world is coming at us faster than it ever has you're not going to be able to change the world. If you're going to live an active life, then the world is going to come at you and it's not what the world does, but it's how you respond to it that matters. The stress, in that case, is a perception and you can learn to change that perception and you can undo what your responses to the stress do by doing some meditation and some relaxation exercises.
So when you have this stress all day long, it's like you, build up a certain momentum of responses and if you never do anything about it, then that momentum, that high momentum of responses of stress is going to stay there. But if you do even 5 or 10 minutes of meditation or breathing exercises or relaxation training, then you can reset that stress response to a low baseline. You can undo the majority of that physiological stress in just a few minutes. Reducing stress is not about avoiding things like most people, because then you can't have a life anymore.
What you can do is you can change your responses to them and you can help your body reset. We've got several videos on that as well, so 5 to 10 minutes once or twice a day, meditation breathing exercises will do wonders because it changes your brain. It's not about changing the way the world is the things that you do.
Number 9 monitor your blood pressure and see your doctor regularly. So I don't think it's a bad idea to monitor your blood pressure regularly, especially if you know that you have a tendency great way to do it. That is if you measure it, and then notice it's a little high. You do your breathing exercises and you see it come down.
Then you know that you did it right. If it doesn't come down, you need to do more. You need to get it more.
A habit you need to get better at it, so it gains some momentum in your body. So it's not a bad thing to monitor your blood pressure. The see your doctor part. I want to caution you because that could be a good thing.
If your doctor understands what we're talking about here, that has not been my experience. My experience is that they want to put you on a blood pressure pill as soon as your blood pressure rises, even a couple of points and then you're taking a chemical for something that may or may not even be an issue so see a doctor. If they can help, you actually return to homeostasis if they can educate you and give you some tools about finding balance and getting to the root causes then absolutely number 10. They said that you should get a support group so that you can interact with people in similar conditions, so you can cope with your condition, and I think this is very very unfortunate.
This is based on our perception, our the idea that all these conditions are permanent, chronic and incurable because they don't address the root causes. They believe all these conditions are incurable. So then, the best thing you can do is to cope with it and find groups where you can get some sympathy and know that you're not alone.
But if we understand that there are some simple mechanisms that create all these problems, then we can undo those mechanisms and there's no reason to cope. I bet you are given the choice of restoring function in the body or coping with the condition. I bet you ninety-nine out of a hundred would want to restore health and feel good and address and handle the root cause.
That has been my experience. So if we look through these ten things, we see that we get a check mark on losing weight, but only if we do it right through insulin resistance. That exercise is great. It helps your brain to that eating a healthy diet is a good idea, but not if you follow the regular dietary guidelines because that's going to drive you toward insulin resistance.
You don't want to work on reducing your sodium unless you already have kidney failure or some sort of severe damage that you can't process water and salt properly. You do want to limit your alcohol. If you do want to quit smoking you may or may not want to reduce your caffeine. I like coffee a lot, so I do part decaf and part caf.
I do about 70 % decaf cuz. I just like a lot of cups, but I think too much caffeine is going to drive that stress a little too much. We do want to reduce stress by doing it right work on the brain and working on the ability of the body to deal with it. To respond to it appropriately, not by avoiding things.
So when we look at all these reasons, we see that almost everything has to do with three things: insulin, resistance, or it is increased need due to things like smoking, anaemia or stress, there's some good advice in here. But we want to understand that if you really want to get to the root cause, it all comes down to insulin, resistance and if your body has an increased need to deliver fuel, that's why the body raises the blood pressure. It's not an accident, it's not stupid and this increased need could be real or imaginary, so really would be if you're actually out exercising that's a real physiological need. If you are just emotionally stressed, then it's an inappropriate need and then the stress response is what you want to deal with.
If you enjoy this information, then Thank you. So much for watching and I'll see you next time.