10 ways to lower blood pressure
naturally today I'm going to talk about some of the myths and misconceptions
around blood pressure so that you understand how it works that way you
don't have to waste time and get lost in the details that are not going to help
you but instead you can focus your effort on the mechanisms that aren't
gonna get you better coming right up hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and
a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by
understanding how the body really works make sure that you subscribe and hit
that notification bell so that you don't miss anything the 10 ways I'm gonna talk
about are straight off of the Internet this is from the Mayo Clinic this was
their top ten ways to control blood pressure without medication so we're
gonna discuss them some of them are really good but they'd never explain why
they work and some of them are not so good because they don't understand how
it works I recently did a video on blood pressure where I laid out some more of
the foundation and today we're going to dig into some more detail around that
first of all just to get back to the basics normal blood pressure is 120 to
180 that is optimal for most people but there are some natural variations so
anywhere from 120 to 140 could be normal for you but it's still a good idea to
understand so that if your blood pressure is starting to go up that you
know it might indicate something we know that blood pressure over 180 is a crisis
you want to get help as soon as possible but and we're going to put this in
perspective we also know that during exercise your blood pressure can get up
to 220 and that's totally normal why does that happen how can the body
compensate and manage that number one on their list to lower blood pressure is to
lose weight and watch your belly fat so it's again this advice that we hear over
and over and all vermin why is that why would that be
helpful and it's not because the belly fat is causing anything it's that the
belly fat is a result of something destructive namely insulin resistance so
if you reduce insulin resistance then you lose weight and your blood pressure
typically comes down the good way the right way of reducing insulin resistance
is low carb intermittent fasting and keto like we talked about on this
channel that way you reduce your cravings you reduce your hunger and your
satiety levels go up you eat less because your insulin resistance is going
down now you lose the weight your blood pressure comes down but it's not the
weight that does is it's the fact that you are d congesting your body number to
exercise regularly this is great advice but what's the mechanism why does that
work well exercise is the number one stimulant for your brain your brain is
what ultimately manages your blood pressure like we said blood pressure is
a variable it is being regulated and controlled and managed every moment of
your life so if we can help the brain get into better balance it's going to
help manage your blood pressure better and exercise is 90% of the signals of
the activation that keeps your brain alive so when you exercise it's like you
turn up the dimmer switch all the way on your brain and when the brain's dimmer
switch is all the way up when your frontal lobe is lit up bright now it has
all that power to inhibit stress stress is what raises blood sugar the frontal
lobe is what reduces stress and exercise is what drives the frontal lobe so
exercise is going to activate the frontal lobe the frontal lobe is going
to inhibit your sympathetic nervous system or your stress
that's why exercise works right because during the exercise you're gonna drive
your blood pressure higher and higher and higher because that's appropriate
during those circumstances so it's not the exercise that lowers it it's the
exercise that stimulates the frontal lobe that helps the brain gets healthier
and now you have better control of your stress responses number three eat a
healthy diet great advice but what is a healthy diet okay that's the big
conundrum and unfortunately this being off of the Mayo Clinic site a healthy
diet to them is something that promotes insulin resistance it's going to be 60
65% carbohydrate up to 150 grams of sugar per day in the terms of added
sugar lactose and fructose so that's why they believe that pre-diabetes always
leads to diabetes because with that diet it does so yes eat a healthy diet but
don't follow the guidelines the high carbohydrate because that's going to
increase your insulin resistance and that's why they think all these things
are irreversible number four reduce sodium and here's a big one this is
maybe the biggest misconception the biggest myth of all when it comes to
blood pressure you hear that all the time probably no one is unaware of that
advice that lower your sodium intake here's how it actually works we're gonna
look at a little bit bigger picture here so let's assume that you start with
balanced blood pressure you start with balance in your body and then you eat a
bunch of salt salt is sodium also known as an atrium and some some languages so
you eat sodium sodium binds to water so now you the sodium is pulling water to
it it makes the blood increase in volume so it's swell
you're your total blood volume therefore the blood pressure goes up so far that
the reasoning makes sense that sodium causes high blood pressure but what they
don't take into consideration is one of the most powerful principles in your
physiology it's called pressure diuresis diuresis as in diuretic that's the drug
they give you to drive fluids out of your body to force the body to go beyond
what it wants to do and get rid of fluids that's called diuresis and that
will lower your blood pressure but the body already has a mechanism to do that
unless something else overrides it so we have all this sequence blood pressure
goes up then the pressure diuresis means that a relatively small increase in
blood pressure resulting from increased blood volume is going to result in a
relatively larger diuresis getting rid of water and sodium so you get back to
balance and then you eat more sodium your water goes up your blood pressure
goes up but even a tiny little bit of increase in blood pressure is going to
push that water out through the kidneys so the kidneys have a mechanism that
when the salt is higher then the body wants it then it has a powerful
mechanism to get rid of that sodium and if it doesn't get rid of that sodium
according to pressure diuresis principle that it's because something is
overriding it okay so sometimes it's appropriate to maintain higher blood
pressure and then it kicks out it overrides that pressure diuresis so when
it's appropriate to have high blood pressure is either if you're in a real
stress or what's more commonly in a perceived stress but either way there
is a perception that overrides this mechanism your body knows how to get rid
of the sodium when it wants to when it's supposed to so let's ask this question
if a slight increase in blood pressure is going to create diuresis meaning that
you create a lot of urine output then how come you can exercise and get your
blood pressure all the way up to 220 almost double your blood pressure and
not pee yourself every time you go running or exercising because if the
body didn't have compensatory mechanisms then that would happen every time you
exercised okay you'd have to exercise with diapers there would be no way
around it but the point is the body has all these different systems to to
compensate to create the right amount of blood pressure depending on the
situation and when you're exercising high blood pressure is appropriate so
it's going to override the pressure diuresis you're going to maintain that
blood volume even though the blood pressure is very high and again it's the
brain that does this so at rest when the stress is over the frontal lobe is
supposed to inhibit your stress your sympathetic or your fight flight system
but during exercise the fight flight system is appropriate that's what fuels
your body so now the frontal lobe is going to drive that sympathetic it's
going to increase the fight flight response going to increase your heart
rate increase your blood pressure so you can produce all of that fuel delivery to
the muscles and now it sends a signal to the pituitary to make a hormone called
angiotensin 2 and that angiotensin 2 also produces stimulates a hormone
called antidiuretic hormone so these two hormones put together says during
exercise we need really high blood pressure but we don't want any of that
water to leak out through the kidneys all
all the reason that you have high blood pressure is not because of the sodium
and because of all this advice then there are more people who are deficient
in sodium there are people who are have a too low a blood volume they can't keep
their blood pressure up rather than the opposite
another thing about salt and kidneys that fascinate me when it's being when
salt is being called evil at every turn is the fact that the kidneys actually
filter out about 250 liters of fluid every day but you only get rid of your
only void about one and a half liter so 97 98 percent of the fluid gets
reabsorbed and along with that fluid the body also reabsorbs the sodium because
sodium is such a precious nutrient it is our most important signaling mineral in
the body so it doesn't seem to me like the body if it has the ability to get
rid of sodium at will and it absorbs reabsorbs 97 percent of the sodium why
would it do that if sodium was a bad thing alright doesn't make sense now if
you have kidney failure if your if other parts of your system are so damaged that
they no longer have the ability to regulate this now salt can make your
blood pressure worse but we're talking about a very very small percentage of
people and if you have kidney failure yes restrict your sodium if you don't
then don't worry about it number five way to lower blood pressure limit
alcohol so again that's a great idea and then they go on to say that in small
doses such as one to two drinks a day alcohol actually helps lower blood
pressure but in larger doses with two or more drinks a day it
actually makes blood pressure worse so why is that well again one to two drinks
help you relax it helps you have less stress and stress is what brings up the
blood pressure it helps your brain relax it helps calm down your sympathetic
nervous system that's that's why it works but if you have a lot of drinks if
you start drinking multiple drinks every day now you're moving toward fatty liver
and insulin resistance because alcohol also acts like a sugar even though it
doesn't drive blood sugar per se it kind of acts like a sugar in the body I tell
people that less is always better that if you're going to drink have one to two
drinks and give yourself at least two days a week without any drinking number
six quit smoking great advice but why does that work we touched on this in the
previous video because smokers block their oxygen carrying capacity when they
breathe in the carbon monoxide that blocks the red blood cell hemoglobin so
they don't have the ability to carry oxygen as well as a nonsmoker so now the
body has to increase its effort at fuel delivery it has to increase heart rate
increase blood pressure to deliver more blood because each unit of blood has
less oxygen so if you quit smoking then you have more access to oxygen and blood
pressure goes down number seven reduce caffeine so caffeine is a form of
stress it has the same effect on the body as adrenaline it fits into the same
type of receptors as adrenaline which is a vasoconstrictor so yes in most cases
caffeine will have a direct effect on blood pressure but in a healthy person
that's not a problem because it doesn't create the circumstances behind blood
pressure it's a temporary signal that while you have that caffeine your blood
pressure is going to be a few point higher but it doesn't create a
problem in itself unless you have weak adrenals or if your stress level is such
that you kind of blow it out of proportion by adding just a little bit
of caffeine so watch how that works for you for most people it's not a problem
because it's a temporary effect that doesn't affect any root causes it
doesn't worsen any root causes unless you have adrenal problems number 8 way
to reduce blood pressure is to reduce stress so absolutely stress is the
perception that the body needs more resources and it's going to increase
blood pressure and block out rate to deliver more fuel to the body to deal
with the stress so that's a good thing however when they talk about reducing
stress they're talking about avoiding stressful situations and that's not what
reducing stress is about because the world is coming at us faster than it
ever has you're not going to be able to change the world if you're gonna live a
an active life then the world is going to come at you and it's not what the
world does but it's how you respond to it that matters the stress in that case
is is a perception and you can learn to change that perception and you can undo
what your responses to the stress do by doing some meditation and some
relaxation exercises so when you have this stress all day long it's like you
build up a certain momentum of responses and if you never do anything about it
then that momentum that high momentum of responses of stress is going to stay
there but if you do even 5 or 10 minutes of meditation or breathing exercises or
relaxation training then you can reset that stress response to a low baseline
you can undo the majority of that physiological stress in just a few
minutes reducing stress is not about avoiding
things like most people because then you can't have a life anymore what you can
do is you can change your responses to them and you can help your body reset
we've got several videos on that as well so 5 to 10 minutes once or twice a day
meditation breathing exercises will do wonders because it changes your brain
it's not about changing the way the world is the things that you do number 9
monitor your blood pressure and see your doctor regularly so I don't think it's a
bad idea to monitor your blood pressure regularly especially if you know that
you have a tendency great way to do that is if you measure it and then you notice
it's a little high you do your breathing exercises and you see it come down then
you know that you did it right if it doesn't come down you need to do more
you need to get it more a habit you need to get better at it so it gains some
momentum in your body so it's not a bad thing to monitor your blood pressure the
see your doctor part I want to caution you because that could be a good thing
if your doctor understands what we're talking about here that has not been my
experience my experience is that they want to put you on a blood pressure pill
as soon as your blood pressure rises even a couple of points and then you're
taking a chemical for something that may or may not even be an issue so see a
doctor if they can help you actually return to homeostasis if they can
educate you and give you some tools about finding balance and getting to the
root causes then absolutely number 10 they said that you should get a support
group so that you can interact with people in similar condition so you can
cope with your condition and I think this is very very unfortunate this is
based on our perception our the idea that all these conditions are permanent
chronic and incurable because they don't address the root causes they believe all
these conditions are incurable so then the best thing you can do is to cope
with it and find groups where you can get some sympathy and know that you're
not alone but if we understand that there are some simple mechanisms that
create all these problems then we can undo those mechanism and there's no
reason to cope I bet you given the choice of restoring function in the body
or coping with the condition I bet you ninety-nine out of a hundred would want
to restore health and feel good and address handle the root cause that has
been my experience so if we look through these these ten things we see that we
get check mark on losing weight but only if you do it right through insulin
resistance that exercise is great it helps your brain that eating a healthy
diet is a good idea but not if you follow the regular dietary guidelines
because that's gonna drive you toward insulin resistance you don't want to
work on reducing your sodium unless you already have kidney failure or some sort
of severe damage that you can't process water and salt properly you do want to
limit your alcohol you do want to quit smoking you may or may not want to
reduce your caffeine I like coffee a lot so I do part decaf and part CAF I do
about 70% decaf cuz I just like a lot of cups but I think too much caffeine is
going to drive that stress a little too much we do want to reduce stress by
doing it right work on the brain work on the ability of the body to deal with it
to respond to it appropriately not by avoiding things so when we look at all
these reasons we see that almost everything has to do with three things
its insulin resistance or it is an increased need due to things like
smoking anemia or stress there's some good advice in here but we want to
understand that if you really want to get to the root cause it all comes down
– insulin resistance and if your body has an increased need to deliver fuel
that's why the body raises the blood pressure it's not an accident it's not
stupid and this increased need could be real or imaginary so real would be if
you're actually out exercising that's a real physiological need if you are just
emotionally stressed then it's an inappropriate need and then the stress
response is what you want to deal with if you enjoy this information then I bet
you're gonna love that video thank you so much for watching and I'll see you
next time

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