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.

To echo Barrack Obama’s famous battle cry: ‘Yes we can!’ This is to give you hope and encouragement. You’re not a goner! Today I’ll be talking about the various treatments that are available. Life style is the first, and in this field you’ll have the most of control in your hands. Then I’ll mention drug treatments. But by then you will have turned over that control to your physician! Lastly I’ll touch upon medical procedures and surgeries that are available. However, before we opt for the pill popping, we can do better! Life style, life style and then some. We can lower our blood pressure, and we can do it naturally. Breathing exercises, preferably with music, 15 minutes a day, will put you in the right zone.

Is it necessary to mention that one should not be smoking? Unfortunately yes. Many of my friends still smoke. They may lie about it, do it in secret (I mean what a social disease this has become! You complain you’ve become a social outcast? Doesn’t it motivate you to quit? I may share my own story sometimes on how I quit, a long time ago). Eat a low fat diet, low salt diet. I can hear David getting exasperated: ‘Low fat! We all need a small amount of animal fat. It’s absurd to take out the full fat out of the yogurt and then add sugar for flavor!’ Absurd indeed.  Did you know that lacking sulfur in your diet may cause heart disease? Do you believe that red meat is bad for you? Look at this bit of incongruity: red meat is bad for you….no, it’s good for you! It has to be grass-fed which equals high quality! Free range chickens will give you similar benefits. Animal protein turns to amino acids when eaten which you need to produce new protein in your own body!

A small amount of salt IS necessary, it just needs to be the right kind of salt. Is it table salt or sea salt, that is the question! Table salt is mined from underground salt deposits and is processed. This takes out essential minerals but then it contains additives to prevent it from clumping. Sea salt comes from evaporated sea water, and depending on the source/quality of the water, it contains vital trace minerals and elements that you won’t find in your usual shaker. I have observed people taking to the salt shaker as if the meal on the plate were unpalatable without a generous sprinkling. Without ever tasting first! Besides this being an insult to the cook/chef, it’s a bad habit. Think heart healthy.

It’s good for you!

Keep your weight under control. If you have diabetes, make sure that it is very well under control. I know, I know, what a chore, I hear you say. But you have got little chance of success if you don’t.  My heart goes out to you. But I don’t want you to have my heart bleeding for you, so hitch your wagon to your favorite star! Monitor your blood pressure regularly. Gentle exercise and limiting the amount of alcohol you consume also has a dramatic effect on your chances of success. You’ll be thinner, trimmer and happier. That’s all you need to give you the 8 hours or so of sleep for an ultimately favorable outcome. So Cheers! Enjoy your glass of red wine, a few grains of glittering sea salt, a nice slice of grass-fed beef, go for a walk with your neighbor’s dog if you don’t have one and you will have taken care of your blood pressure naturally!

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!

Last night a guy called on the toll free line, very hyper, asking for the BreatheEasy music. He told me he’d been a boxer, very fit and muscular, but then quit almost overnight to start his security business. ‘I get out of bed, get in the car, get on the desk, get in the car, get home and go to bed,’ he described his life style. ‘I have high blood pressure, it’s 190/120!’ ‘That’s quite high, haven’t you been to your doctor?’ I asked. ‘Yes, but I don’t like to take the medication, I am desperate to try the natural way, breathing naturally to lower my blood pressure.!’ Still sounding very stressed, I asked him how old he was. ‘Early thirties,’ he said. ‘I also have an enlarged heart, and I’m too scared to go back to find out I might die soon.’ After a long talk, we agreed it’s best to change life style, go to the doctor and talk about options and last but not least, do the breathing exercizes to get his blood pressure under control.

An enlarged heart is not a disease in itself but a physical sign of accompanying diseases. Those diseases are myriad and will be listed below. Not all conditions lead to an enlarged heart, and treatment will depend on the underlying cause:

Alcoholism; Amyloidosis (an abnormal protein deposit in organs and tissue); anemia; arrythmia; cocaine and crack abuse; heart attack, heart disease and heart valve disease;

autoimmune diseases; thyroid disease; high blood pressure and many more. However, recently it has been understood that athletic endurance training such as marathons and Iron Man challenges in all it’s variations may cause an enlarged heart. Just as body muscles are being worked, the heart is a muscle and reacts to training or overtraining by becoming larger. Even medications can be responsible for an enlarged heart. Pregnancy, viral infections and nutritional deficiencies are further causes.

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about symptoms of an enlarged heart and what to do about it. But like my late night caller insisted, he wanted to lower his blood pressure naturally. You can’t go wrong with it. It will also relieve his stress, an obviously related cause for his high blood pressure. By the time we were finished, he was breathing much lighter, much slower and he was a bit more hopeful again. Good luck to him. It’s a commitment to his own well being and health.

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

When it comes to diet, most people think of it as deprivation. Diet is restriction, boredom, it is prescribed by some so-called expert (how many books have you bought on the subject and yet got nowhere?). Sadly, most of us have lost our way, we’re unable to trust ourselves what is right and good for us. We’re no longer self-sufficient, foraging Neanderthals, neither are we evolved enough to be linked up to some magic tube that feeds us all the right stuff in the just right amount, with the benefit of no thinking and planning necessary. So this gives some of us considerable anxiety. What is right and how do you do it?

Exercise is diet. No way around it. The easiest diet there is around, I might say. Take it from me. I have ditched my car. Not an easy choice. I am not telling you to do the same. In some places, commuting is the only way out of Sleepyville. So you just get out of the car earlier and walk a bit longer to your destination. The proverbial 20 minutes a day are a joke. But you could go for a sprint a day. A high intensity 3 minute workout is apparently just as good. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17177251 Imagine the time you have left over to do all the cooking from scratch! I ran this morning. I enjoy it, that’s why I do it. Then, just to get my hair cut, run errands (!) I walked into town, did what I had to do and had a look around. After that the long trek back (10 km, if that helps) Good, that’s done.

The next specifically smart diet is this: avoid having anything in your kitchen cupboards that make you weak in the knees, especially after a hard day, whatever a hard day means to you. Physical exertions has made me weak in the knees, and I have nothing in the cupboards that I can take off the shelf and put in my mouth, pronto. Nothing there that doesn’t need to be prepared and cooked. I am patting my back. Well done, I have painted myself into a very healthy corner. No goodies, no car, and quite a way to walk to the nearest shop. So that diet is done and dusted.

So lets recap: exercise will lower your blood pressure naturally. At the moment I feel like the aforementioned foraging Neanderthal, but you don’t have to go as far! ‘Aerobic fitness is a measure of how good your heart and lungs are at getting oxygen into your body and is an excellent predictor of future health’ says the presenter of Horizon: The Truth about Exercise. The 3 minute sprint will do it for you. Then do diet again: have nothing in your cupboards that seduce you to fudge your healthy living. Treats now and again are allowed and welcome. Even I do it and enjoy it tremendously. But only once in a while. Aerobic fitness brings on the right weight brings on the right lower blood pressure naturally. What more do you want and need to do? Nada!

Is there anybody still out there who during dark winter months remembers coughing, spluttering, sniffing and sneezing, heaving feverishly, unable to get out of bed and there was no relief? No pill to take except chicken soup, Grandma’s old stand by? I do, but then again, I grew up in the old world where medication was not available for your every little ache and pain – your ailments were just that – insignificant, and you got over it in due time. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. And I’m still here.

Those Halcyon days, however, are over by a long shot where you felt victorious for fighting your inner demons without any intervention from Big Pharma. I am not saying I miss all those times, but when it comes to pain relief, the pain is in the taking what you take. Aspirin was all we had, the universal panacea since Hippocratic’ times, and it delivered what it promised. It gave us relief of pain, fever, headaches, etc. and even I can appreciate the slogan Bayer coined for it ‘The wonder drug that does wonders.’ Millions of people now take Aspirin every day to prevent heart attacks and doctor’s order to ‘take 2 Aspirins and call me in the morning’ suggests that you have survived another night and are fit enough to tell your doctor all about it.

But I get carried away with the virtues of this little pill. Because for every virtue, there’s the opposite, and that is vice. An aspirin is an aspirin is an aspirin. In the body of the wrong person, it can wreak havoc as badly as any other pill. Bayer would like you believe that their brand is superior, and they’ll charge you for it royally – or big bucks as they say over the pond. After all, somebody has to pay for all those flashy ads. The rise of choices of pills for every different ache and pain has been phenomenal. There’s big money in them there pills. So we come to one of them, the NSAIDs, anti-inflammatory drugs.

I remember arriving in California in 1980, getting a prescription for ‘xxxxxx,’ a nifty, oval-shaped little capsule that truly took pain away; you know, that inconvenient time of the month when doctors tell you that you could well be temporarily insane. Well, I had been with the pain of it all in the old world at least, and I lurved that drug! And in no time this wonderful drug became available OTC – over the counter. First you had to ask your pharmacist to hand it over to you. Now the shelves of your local drug store are groaning under the weight of that plentiful choice. Have been taking them faithfully over the years, treating myself to pain relief from minor pains to major injuries. Now what do I end up with? High blood pressure! Or drug induced hypertension, as the professionals call it. This ain’t no way to lower your blood pressure naturally!

So let me figure out what it exactly does to my body so I can appreciate the danger of taking these little puppies over a life time. Us women out there hate suffering from (yes!) fluid retention, the water in our bodies or mere certain places of our bodies (we all know where!)where it just sticks and wobbles like Jello or Blancmange for you discerning Brits. I have seen plenty of ‘water relief pills/tablets’ on offer at the local drug store/pharmacy so this is an issue. So here you are: holding a pack of ibuprofen and a pack of water relief pills to take your monthly misery away. ‘You don’t want to do that!’ your friendly check-out person warns you? No! Highly unlikely! Ibuprofen causes fluid retention, decreasing the function of your kidneys, therefore raising your blood pressure which of course puts greater stress on your poor heart and kidneys. This ain’t no way to treat a lady….or high blood pressure naturally!

There have been plenty of studies in women who had no high blood pressure to begin with, but after prolonged use of ibuprofen/NSAIDs ended up with hypertension. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9074128/ns/health-heart_health/t/are-painkillers-risks-worth-benefits/ Of course sometimes the risk doesn’t outweigh the benefit. Think of yourself with such  conditions that are truly painful: arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, gout, or even psioritic arthritis. Pain is the name of the game, and I don’t know if that kind of prolonged, debilitating pain can be borne without accepting the risks of taking pain relief. Of course not, so you accept hypertension as the necessary evil for the benefit of pain relief. And you’ll have to accept taking medication for your drug induced hypertension. Not an easy road to take, but here you’re sitting stranded anyway. The consensus is: if your pain is bearable (and that is certainly pain in the eye of the beholder) hold off on those pain killers. Use them infrequently so you get the best benefit from them. Or better, try to lower high blood pressure naturally. Not just high blood pressure, but other normal, everyday ailments, aches and pains. Chicken soup will do…