High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Fortunately, researchers have identified steps to help keep it within the healthy range (90/60 to 120/90). One of these steps could be to take a 500 mg vitamin C supplement. Although our requirements are well below this number (75 to 90 mg), a report published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is the first to show the effect of 500 mg of Vitamin C to moderately reduce blood pressure.

The study and results
To shed insight upon the connections between vitamin C supplements and blood pressure levels, researchers analyzed and combined data from 29 previous randomised, controlled trials on this topic. The median length of the studies was eight weeks and the median dose of vitamin C was 500 mg per day.

Here are the following findings :

·      In all participants, vitamin C supplementation reduced systolic blood pressure—the top number in a reading—by an average of 3.84, and reduced diastolic blood pressure—the bottom number—by an average of 1.48
·      In participants particularly with high blood pressure, vitamin C supplementation lowered systolic blood pressure by 4.85, and lowered diastolic blood pressure by 1.67

Tips to maintain healthy blood pressure

·      It’s important to know your numbers. High blood pressure has no obvious and clearly apparent symptoms. The only way to find out about your blood pressure is to get it checked.
·      Eat well. Base your diet around lots of fresh vegetables and fruit and include two or three servings of dairy daily, and not necessarily the low-fat version. Good fat is taken out and replaced with sugar! Eat no more than a few servings of red meat per week, preferably high quality, organically raised. If it’s not in your budget, just leave it out.
·      Forget table salt. A few flakes of sea salt will do the trick. Limit processed foods high in sodium (salt), and up your potassium intake. You can do this by including green leafy vegetables, beans and lentils, low-sodium tomato juice and sauce, oranges and orange juice, prunes and plums, bananas, apricots and raisins.
·       Keep physically active. Walk wherever your feet take you. Leave your car in the drive way. That will help you keep blood pressure lower, it will help you control your weight, which is quite important because being overweight is a high blood pressure risk factor. Enjoy life!

Heart failure as a result of an enlarged heart can be decreased or prevented in those with high blood pressure. Considering that 20% of all Americans with high blood pressure (that makes 12 million of them) have LVH, (left ventricular hypertrophy) they are all at risk of heart failure. NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell researchers (JAMA, 2004 and 2006), demonstrated in their study that prevention is the key to further risk to cardiac complications such as heart attack, stroke, atrial fibrillation and death.

“The message for high-blood-pressure patients is that by preventing or reversing enlarged heart, there is an added benefit, over and above any reduction in blood pressure, of lowering risk for heart failure,” says the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Peter Okin, director of clinical affairs and professor of medicine in the Greenberg Division of Cardiology at Weill Cornell Medical College and a cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070913090402.htm

And so the story goes again, ad nauseam: adults who don’t smoke, maintain their healthy weight, get plenty of exercise and physical activity; eat lots of fresh vegetable, leave out processed meats have a fighting chance. What more can you do? Natural Methods of Lowering Blood Pressure is Still the Best in the Long Term. Forget table salt. Have a few crystals of sea salt. Eat whole grain breakfast cereals for breakfast. On the other hand, if you want to stay fuller longer because you’re watching your weight, go for eggs with a bit of cheese. High protein and a small amount of fat makes the proverbial ‘King’s breakfast!’

Leave out all sodas that contain high fructose corn syrup or artifical sweeteners. Another benefit to all this is to those people with borderline diabetes. A healthy heart is a prerequisite for the health of the body as a whole. Live your life to the fullest with joy and commitment to health. Small but life long, life altering changes should give you the confidence in your body, mind and soul. Enjoy!

Now comes the boring part: pill popping. ! It is estimated that 5 million people in the US have heart failure, and with each decade the risk doubles. I hope I have your attention! You have tried, and failed, to get your high blood pressure under control. You kicked butt but now the tables are turned and your physician is arguably kick starting you into compliance. This will be the beginning of a trial and error period for you and your doctor: will you be able to tolerate this or that pill, will it help your blood pressure or won’t it? There’s no guarantee. We might as well have a look what is out there.

Diuretics

There are a bewildering variety of diuretics that treat a variety of conditions. Here I’ll be concerned with diuretics for high blood pressure which lower the amount of sodium in your body. So-called loop diuretics and thiazides work independently of their diuretic effect. Other mechanisms than those of reducing the amount of water in your body are involved. You won’t need as much medication as those that reduce blood pressure by having you run to the toilet. These two types of medication can have unpleasant side effects such as lassitude, or lethargy, including thirst, muscle cramps and low blood pressure! Spironolactone (Aldactone) or furosemide (Lasix) may cause much more serious side effects, such as arrhythmia, muscle weakness, coma, seizures, stupor…..

ACE Inhibitors

Angiotension-converting enzyme inhibitors also lower your blood pressure and improve the pumping ability of your heart. Popular names are enalapril (Vasotec), lisinopril (Zestril), ramipril (Altace) or captopril (Capoten). How do these drugs work? Imagine a garden hose. It’s stiff, hard, has shrunk to a smaller diameter, and you’re eager to water your lawn. Crank on the water pressure! Because that’s what it takes. Now put this chemical in the water supply and your garden hose will relax. Opened up the water will flow much easier and your garden will turn green again!

Beta Blockers

Such as such as carvedilol (Coreg) and metoprolol (Lopressor). Personally I have benefited from them. If you’re a bit on the anxious side at times, this will certainly help reduce that awfully fast and hard thumping poor heart of yours. They work by blocking adrenaline and noradrenaline in certain parts of your body. But still, you don’t want to be on permanently. Side effect include an inability to exert yourself. Or with quite some discomfort. It’s like putting the breaks on while driving your car.

Anticoagulants,

such as warfarin (Coumadin), to reduce the risk of blood clots that could cause a heart attack or stroke. So you have your choice…or doctors orders, depending on how well you tolerate these. Natural Methods of Lowering High Blood Pressure is Still the Best in the Long Term.

Lower Blood Pressure Naturally for long term benefits according to Experts or so the latest findings are telling us. News released recently just confirms what we already knew and that is, our life style may be killing us.

Dutch researchers have recently published their findings in the Journal Stroke and their major findings, the results of studies concerning over 20,000 adults over 10 years lead them to believe that eating lots of fruit and vegetables with white flesh may help to protect against strokes.

The key thing here is that Stroke experts have also said that people should not e put off eating other colours of vegetables.

The final piece in the jigsaw that any sufferer of High Blood Pressure will tell you is that sooner or later you have to view lifestyle changes that are sustainable and indeed if you can find a natural method of controlling your own blood pressure or lowering the blood pressure naturally then so much the better.

Check out http://www.control-your-blood-pressure.com/lower-blood-pressure-breathing-breakthrough.html where Natural methods of dealing with High Blood Pressure are advocated

An enlarged heart can either be a  disease or a reaction to how you use your body. Yesterday I mentioned that serious and prolonged endurance exercise will ‘strengthen’ your heart…. as we’ve been told for a few decades now. But you might as well call it an ‘enlarged’ heart. Why not? Does the heart know the difference? Recent attention has been paid to highly trained athletes dropping dead at a young age. We may be in for a surprise in the very near future. In addition, our ancestors couldn’t afford to burn such vast amounts of calories without paying for it not even in the long run. Extreme endurance training is perhaps a modern condition of opportunity: that of the ‘overly full larder.’ I know that some African tribes stalk an animal for hours on end, but they don’t suffer from a full larder.

In the early stages symptoms are not easily noticed, or in some people symptoms do not necessarily appear. Usually, at the start only the lower chambers of the heart are affected. Wait too long though and the upper chambers will go too. By then you’ll know because the heart won’t be able to pump the necessary amount of blood to fulfill the demands of your body. Shortness of breath is the most obvious first sign you notice yourself – while you’re walking; waking up short of breath at night, and eventually, your ankles will be swollen. This is because fluid can build up behind the heart and store in the rest of the body, causing weight gain. The fluid also builds up in the lungs, causing wheezing, which is the mechanism of shortness of breath.

Shortness of breath being the most obvious symptom, there are other signs to watch out for. As mentioned above, weight gain is to be watched. It may be called obesity but if you are prescribed diuretics, you’ll notice you weren’t fat at all. You flush out all the fluids stored up in your body. For a while you stop wheezing, which will come as a great relief to you. Sleeping will be somewhat improved, but I am getting ahead of myself. Accompanied by ‘obesity’ is sleep apnea, where you suddenly stop breathing and wake up with a horrible startle because your body needs oxygen and your lungs need to fill up with vital air!

High blood pressure is, of course, a major culprit for an enlarged heart. With it come palpitations, chest pain, coughing and heart racing, or what I call ‘tripping’ – an uncomfortable feeling of going helter-skelter for want of a better expression. When that happens, don’t add panic to fear – breathe easy! Keep going. Calm yourself. Last but not least is coronary artery disease, the No. 1 killer in America and the Western world. Plaque builds up in the arteries and obstruct or even block efficient blood flow. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at what you can do about the condition before it becomes a disease – controlling your blood pressure aggressively, naturally is one way. Yes we can!

If  you have heart disease, you will have paid attention to your symptoms and you will be in treatment for it. But don’t bet on having those tell tale symptoms until it is too late. Heart failure doesn’t mean your heart is failing. It’s the pumping power that is failing: lacking the power to pump blood at an adequate rate for supply of oxygen and nutrients, your precious juice moves slower through the body on the way to the heart. In response to that slowness pressure builds up in the heart. What other can your heart do in response than stretch like an overblown balloon? Your heart chambers bag out as we can readily imagine, or become stiff and thick. A vicious cycle.

Your hear muscle adapts to cope with the changes, but not for the better. You know what happens at your grandkid’s birthday party: the little terror keeps on blowing and blowing that cool balloon, and eventually pop it goes. Bagged out. Unable to pump nicely, the way we expect, your kidneys try to compensate by storing water in your limbs, lungs and other organs. I mean blood is thicker than water, we say…Eventually you’ll notice this fluid retention in your legs, abdomen and bum, but you might not have caught on yet! You just thought you put on some weight! Naturally, you say, your body is slowing down a bit.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to you, your body is filling up with the fluid, and like the proverbial drop in the bucket, it is just a matter of time before that last drop will come and get you. Your lungs are congested and you’re drowning. You’re wheezing some time

Before that event, and if you’re the type who’d rather not know, let your doctor tell you it’s…bronchitis! After all, you hardly ever go to the doctor, you have no intimate relationship with them, and you’re both wildly guessing at this point. Your half-full glass philosophy will keep you on an even keel, and I am sure although doctors are known for imagining they have all the diseases they encounter while training, it really does helps not to think of the worst first. So it is bronchitis, strange but well, they are the doctors after all.

Before I continue on this road tomorrow, I’ll stress the fact that it IS important to keep fit, to exercise as long as one can – and in addition – it IS important to keep one’s blood pressure as low as possible. To recap, the heart is under greater pressure, therefore the blood can’t deliver what the body needs, your kidneys respond by withholding water that your body stores in extremities, organs, and your lungs. In response to this challenge, try to lower your blood pressure at all cost and lower it naturally. Of course with this disease you’ll be taking many pills to contain the situation for as long as possible, but it never hurts to go just that extra mile.

…to be continued