The Missing Link To
Lower Blood Pressure...

And how to get it!

If you’ve been battling high blood pressure you’re surely familiar with a long list of remedies and lifestyle modifications that are claimed to lower your blood pressure naturally. These include various foods and diets, nutritional supplements, exercise, stress-reduction techniques and more.

Explanations of their effects are often complex and long-winded. But despite all the theories it usually comes down to just one remarkable substance, an invisible gas called nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide is not a laughing matter (that’s its cousin, nitrous oxide, the so-called laughing gas). The number and importance of nitric oxide’s roles in the body is so vital that Psychology Today has proclaimed it “The New Hero Of Human Biology”.

As a neurotransmitter or “signaling molecule”, nitric oxide (chemical symbol NO) is at work behind nearly everything that goes on in the body. Here are just a few of the things nitric oxide can do:

• Keeps us healthy be fighting infections and tumors

• Helps us think and feel as a neurotransmitter in the brain

• Extends life by repairing cells

• Enhances life by preventing or reversing ED (erectile dysfunction)

By helping to deliver glucose, adrenaline and other substances through the blood, nitric oxide is a natural and legal performance enhancer. Without nitric oxide there would be no “runner’s high” and no “muscle burn” from exercise. In fact, bodybuilders are so eager to get nitric oxide that they’ll pay exorbitant prices for (probably useless) NO supplements.

But for the purposes of this article nitric oxide is most important for its role in regulating blood pressure. Nitric oxide is a potent vasodilator, meaning it relaxes and expands blood vessels, thus increasing blood flow and reducing blood pressure. High levels of nitric oxide help maintain healthy blood pressure while low levels contribute to hypertension.

Nitric oxide in the atmosphere has been known for decades. But it wasn’t until 1998 that a group of doctors discovered nitric oxide’s role in the body, a discovery for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The abilities of nitric oxide to prevent heart disease are truly amazing. According to Dr. Louis Ignarro, one of the Nobel Prize winners, NO is able to:

• Increase blood flow by up to 200%

• Reduce blood pressure by up to 60 points

• Reduce arterial plaque by 50%

• Inhibit formation of clots and inflammation in blood vessels

• Reduce cholesterol by up to 20%

So the next question is obvious: How can we get more nitric oxide?

The answer brings up the most remarkable fact yet about nitric oxide: you don’t “get” it … we manufacture our own nitric oxide in our cells!

For this reason and because nitric oxide is a gas, you can’t get it from supplements. Despite this fact, do a web search and you’ll get page after page of promoters pushing supplements they claim will increase your nitric oxide levels.

On one level their claims make sense: the supplements contain L-arginine, an amino acid from which nitric oxide is produced in the body. In theory, increasing L-arginine levels should increase nitric oxide but the reality is somewhat different. Most experts argue that supplements simply do not work in the body in the same way as when the substance occurs naturally.

So it’s surely more useful to obtain L-arginine naturally. One way to do this is through diet. Foods that are rich in protein also are often high in L-arginine. These include meat and dairy, nuts and legumes, seafood, chocolate and cereals like oats and wheat. It’s no coincidence that many of these foods are recommended for high blood pressure, though usually for different reasons.

Another and probably better way to obtain nitric oxide is through exercise. Exercise dramatically increases the production of an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase. This in turn produces nitric oxide, which reacts with the lining of blood vessels to expand and increase the blood flow needed by the body for exercise.

Sadly, most of us have a practical limit on the amount of time we can exercise. Many people find it difficult to exercise even a few minutes a day. It’s only a sponsored professional athlete who can get the amount of physical activity needed to produce significant amounts of nitric oxide.

Luckily for the rest of us, there are effective - and surprising – alternatives. Surprising because in many ways these are the opposite of exercise, though in terms of nitric oxide the effects are similar. The first of these is breathing, or slow breathing to be more precise.

Slow breathing increases nitric oxide levels in at least two ways. The first involves a stabilizing of gas levels in the blood. These include oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitric oxide, which all are heavily influenced by our breathing.

Dr. David Anderson, a researcher with the National Institutes of Health, believes that what he calls inhibitory breathing knocks our blood chemistry out of kilter. Under-breathing increases levels of carbon dioxide, making the blood more acidic. Slow breathing reverses this, stabilizing gas levels and boosting nitric oxide production.

This could be why the effects of slow breathing tend to be long-lasting instead of the merely temporary results you get from simple relaxation. Blood pressure reductions through slow breathing are cumulative, building up each day until they last around the clock.

The second way in which slow breathing increases nitric oxide is through “nasal breathing”. A massive fifty percent of the body’s nitric oxide is produced in the paranasal sinuses. In fact, the American Journal of Respiratory Care And Medicine reported  that humming was shown to increase nitric oxide production 15-fold because it stimulates the nasal sinuses.

Breathing slowly through the nose draws this abundant but usually wasted nitric oxide into the lungs. There it expands passageways in the same way as it does in blood vessels, delivering dramatically increased levels of nitric oxide to the bloodstream.

The effects are near-instant. Some people can actually feel an intensely relaxed state of well-being that is produced when breathing in this way. The second and even more relaxing way to get nitric oxide benefits similar to exercise is listening to music. Yes, seriously!

Researchers at the Center for Preventive Cardiology at Maryland University have accurately measured these effects. A study published in December 2008 revealed that listening to relaxing music produced sufficient nitric oxide to expand blood vessels by an average 26%.

Combine slow breathing with relaxing music and the benefits may be even greater. Several successful programs are doing this. According to Dr. Pietro Modesti of the University of Florence in Italy, "It is reassuring to consider that something as simple, easy and enjoyable as daily music listening combined with slow abdominal breathing, may help people naturally lower their blood pressure."

Food, diet, exercise and breathing with music: all very different lifestyle elements counted on for lower blood pressure, but all working with the same remarkable but invisible benefactor: nitric oxide.

Discover a simple but highly effective way to lower blood pressure naturally using slow breathing with music.