High Blood Pressure

[CalamityJane]

Hello Country:

What great advice on this thread!

I commend you indeed for getting your own BP tester.  Have thought that myself, although my BP is normal now, with the control.

Sounds very much like you are on the way to a better way, so to speak.  BP is a strange thing........I'm am the right weight for height/bone structure, have a good diet...check ingredients before I buy, chol. is good, all blood work is good  BUT I still have to take meds for blood pressure.

My own experience starting BP meds is that it can be tricky.  The meds had to be changed several times before one was found that worked well, w/o making me feel dreadful......one I was given slowed my heart rate down so much, I felt like a dish cloth.  When my regular pressure was reading 110/60, the doc. cut the diuretic (sp)pill in half. She felt that was too low, but I felt fine.

Keep up the good work, making small changes one by one....., great thread!

Jane

[itchychick]

Great advice here, indeed.  I had pregnancy induced hypertension with my first baby, which developed at 36 weeks.  I felt fantastic though, so it came as a shock when I was put on bedrest.  Luckily it resolved within hours of giving birth. 

I'm actually on blood pressure medication as a prophylactic measure for my kidneys.  My blood pressure was normal before going on the meds, and has stayed the same since taking them (about 110/60 or 65).  Strange, huh?

[LIGA girl]

Also, I think it would be great to hear from anyone else who has suffered from hypertension and been able to reduce it through diet, exercise, or other methods.

My own experience with blood pressure is that it always reduces when I am fitter, but I have only had high BP as a side effect to  a few drugs I have taken in the past 12 months for my skin disease. Otherwise my BP has always been good, as it is at the moment.  In fact it is sometimes in the low range.

When I taught fitness classes, I had a lady in one of my classes who had high BP, then she lost weight - over 20 kgs - and was able to stop taking her BP medication, but then she regained the weight and had to resume the medication again. She lost weight via the Weight Watchers program and I find that a lot of people who do those sorts of programs do not maintain their weight loss.

[Alohamora]

Also, I think it would be great to hear from anyone else who has suffered from hypertension and been able to reduce it through diet, exercise, or other methods.

10 to 12 years ago I was going to a doctor regularly and my blood pressure was often 135-145/80-90 and whenever it got to the high end of that range I'd get the speech "if it goes any higher we'll have to put you on medicaton".  I cut out all extra salt from my cooking, but that seem to help.

Then I lost my health insurance and since the doctor visits weren't actually helping my problems anyway, I lost interest in regular checkups.   I stopped thinking about my BP for a long time.

Last year I got a home BP meter and was surprised to find my BP was around 120/80! What changed? I think it was the mineral supplements I'd begun to take for other reasons, specificaly the magnesium and potassium.

You see, it's not excess salt that increases BP so much as it's the mineral electrolytes getting out of balance. We all need sodium, potasium, calcium and magnesium, but the typical US diet is heavy in sodium & calcium and deficient in magnesium and potassium. Restore that balance and BP (and a lot of other things) go back to normal. I've eaten increasing amounts of salt this last year and my BP keeps going down, it was around 115/75 for many months. "they" say that's it's not supposed to work that way, but "they" seem to ignore the other necessary minerals and concentrate only on sodium.  I finally got up enough nerve to try a few 1 gram doses of potassium choride in the last week and my BP this morning was 112/65, the lowest I've ever seen. 

Today, my weight is the same as it was 12 years ago and this winter I haven't been exercising very much. I'm probably more stressed now than I was back then. This BP change has to be diet related. I am eating much better now. I take lots of vitamins, so that could be helping, but from what I've learned about electrolyte balance, it's mainly the minerals that affect BP.

[anthropositor]

Hi Aloha,
I haven't paid a lot of attention to magnesium.  But both potassium and calcium are a part of my supplemental regime.  I have been intermittant with them though.  Soon I will fine-tune it a bit more.  I use it in the form of potassium chloride in my cooking to cut the sodium chloride content a bit, and as potassium gluconate tablets (100 mg) in response to an elevating blood pressure.

I buy a lot of bananas for the potassium but most of them go to the chickens (we forget to eat them).  My plan is to eat two or three a day.  It never works out that way.  Cloud will only eat them if I blend them into a meatloaf.

[Alohamora]

http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/news-by-product/news.asp?id=74927&idCat=0&k=garlic-vitamin-C-blood-pressure

I just found this study about garlic and vitamin C taken together lowering blood pressure more than either one alone.

[LIGA girl]

That makes interesting reading Aloha, though I note that it says it is effective for those with marginally high BP only. I think that higher BP readings would need more drastic measures.

[anthropositor]

The most interesting thing about this study is that there is virtually no prospect of adverse effects from the levels of galic and vitamin C used and the amounts are practical to use, far less than the megadoses (of Vitamin C) some of us have been ingesting without difficulty.

I use a certain amount of garlic in my cooking but I don't think it comes to 650 mg a day which is what was used in the study.

[Alohamora]

It's only a small study on a few people. They didn't say that it doesn't work on very high BP, just that they only tested the regimin on a people with mild BP elevation.

It is pretty remarkable that moderate levels of common nutients normalized these patient's BP levels.

There were also some links on that page to other articles on benefits of garlic, some pretty remarkable stuff in there. Maybe we should have a "Garlic" thread?

[LIGA girl]

It's only a small study on a few people. They didn't say that it doesn't work on very high BP, just that they only tested the regimin on a people with mild BP elevation. 

True, it does say that. Regarding garlic, though, I have vitually eliminated it from my diet as it is in a class of food called thiols and there is a body of thought that this food group may exacerbate certain skin diseases like mine. I know that generally garlic is considered to have wonderful properties though and I used to eat a lot of it, maybe to my detriment.

[anthropositor]

Well I crack my peppercorns by hand but I use garlic powder in my cooking.  I don't know if any volatile constituents are lost in the powder but I just don't like getting garlic on my hands.

I eat far less garlic than the garlic fans do.  I agree with LG that rubefacients need to be used with care or avoided by people who have skin conditions which might react to them.

[anthropositor]

My blood pressure today was 117/75.  The various things I have been doing for my cataracts seem to be having some synergistic effects with the things I have been doing for the blood pressure.

[anthropositor]

Today it was up, 135/85.  Perhaps a certain amount of stress (from blowing my transmission and the unknowns about the tradesmen who are doing the repair.)  I finished the dissection of the second eye.  It was a lot briefer than the first.  Notes will be up later today on my blog.

As far as the pressure goes, I'll just add a couple of bananas and perhaps two 100mg tablets of potassium gluconate to my diet today, spaced out through the day.

I have also added an experimental "pudding" to my diet in the past few days.  It is VERY nutritious and extremely high in components which confer immunity.  In spite of the dead transmission probably going to cost $1200+ I have been feeling extremely upbeat, because I feel so healthy and energetic.  I think I'll go to my blog and try to finish the eye notes before breakfast. 

I'm not even craving my usual cup of coffee today.  That is usually the first thing I drink in the morning.  Today I'm just nursing 12 oz of pomegranate-blueberry juice, and have eaten nothing but a few Indian Strawberries from the patch in my front yard.

[itchychick]

Sorry to hear about the transmission, anthro... hope you can get the stress and the pressure under control.

What's in the pudding?

[anthropositor]

It is too experimental to describe at this point.  Although the potential for harm is very small, it would be very irresponsible to describe it before I have been using it for a reasonably long time.  If I am right, I won't be able to contain it for years, but I should at least make the effort to determine ideal proportions of ingredients and so on for a half year.  (The time I am willing to devote to testing a curative substance on myself shortens as I get older, but it does not disappear.)