Treating High Blood Pressure—The Top 5 Moments from My Webinar

As many of you know, I recently presented a webinar—8 Steps to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally. If you missed it, you can view it now. Since high blood pressure is such an important topic, I also want to share some of the top moments from my webinar so you can benefit from the most vital information.

 

1. For high blood pressure too much salt—and not enough salt—are equally problematic. It’s clear that if you have high blood pressure ingesting too much sodium is harmful. For example, if you go to a fast food restaurant and eat flame broiled chicken you get 1,300 mg of sodium. Throw in a dill pickle, and you get another 1,000 mg of sodium. That’s clearly too much. 

 

However, a very low sodium diet (less than 1.8 grams of sodium a day) can also be a disaster, especially if you have congestive heart failure. That’s because if you get too little sodium you can get a hormonal relationship with the kidney that can cause blood pressure to go even higher. 

 

What scientists have found is that with sodium, there’s clearly a sweet spot. My recommendation is to reduce sodium to less than 2.5 grams daily. But if you have heart failure do not be overly aggressive in omitting sodium in your diet altogether because if sodium gets too low the pressure may go up. 

 

2. Why high blood pressure truly is the “silent killer.” Blood pressure is the work your heart needs to do—squeezing blood through your vessels and into the great aorta and peripheral vessels. That work creates pressure, and if that pressure is high it can cause the heart to grow in size. Doctors call that left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). 

 

Left untreated, LVH can cause the walls of the left ventricle to thicken and lose their elasticity, increasing your chance of having heart failure. High blood pressure can also create vulnerability to stroke, angina (heart cramp), and kidney damage. That’s why it’s so important to take steps to lower it.

 

3. Many doctors treat just half of the problem. Frequently, doctors only focus on diastolic high blood pressure. However, there is another entity called isolated systolic hypertension in which the patient has a high systolic pressure, but a reasonable diastolic pressure.

 

I like to achieve lower blood pressures whenever possible. For example, systolic blood pressures greater than 130 mmHg should be aggressively treated by the clinician, despite the fact that the diastolic is less than 80 mmHg. The optimum goal is to achieve a blood pressure of less than 120 (systolic)/80 (diastolic) mmHg. 

 

4. With high blood pressure, women are at higher risk. Many people still think of blood pressure as a man’s concern, yet women are more likely to have high blood pressure. 

 

One reason is that women are more likely to have diastolic dysfunction. Diastolic dysfunction occurs when the left ventricle of the heart—the chamber that generates your systolic blood pressure—becomes stiff. Women tend to be more vulnerable to diastolic dysfunction because they have smaller blood vessels than men. In fact, diastolic dysfunction is the number one cause of heart failure in women. 

 

Metabolic cardiology is the solution for diastolic dysfunction since the heart is starving for energy. It includes a nutrient combination I call the “Awesome Foursome”: CoQ10 (200 mg), broad-spectrum carnitine (1 g), magnesium (200 mg), and ribose (5 g). Together, these nutrients provide the energy substrates for generating adenosine triphosphate (ATP)—the energy of life. 

 

5. For high blood pressure, many doctors ignore the importance of lifestyle. If you have high blood pressure (let’s use 140/90 mmHg as an example), your doctor will most likely want to use a pharmaceutical intervention. I have no problem with that. Also, if during the process of doing your blood pressure workup your doctor finds out that you have kidney impairment blood pressure medications are a must.

 

But in addition to taking blood pressure medications, you need to use lifestyle interventions at the same time—including nutritional supplements, exercise, diet, and reducing stress. 

 

Now it’s your turn: Did any of these high blood pressure facts surprise you?