Hypertension: Avoid High Blood Pressure Meds with New Health Discoveries

Medical researchers are showing us how to deal with hypertension, so as to avoid the prescription medications for high blood pressure that are not good for your wallet and even worse for your libido!

Even if you've been diagnosed with high blood pressure, you can still develop a plan with your doctor to no longer need these medications that tend only to be effective in 50% of the people who take them.

• Here's how you can avoid the eventual side effects of both: 1) weight gain and 2) a lagging libido:

• Medications can treat your high blood pressure but fail to address the underlying causes of the problem, leaving you still at risk. Side effects can range from dizziness to diabetes and, ironically, heart attacks.

• By adding a daily dose of beet juice you can significantly reduce your blood pressure:

A couple of glasses of beet juice will lower blood pressure by 10 points and give you 15% more stamina on the treadmill!

• You already know about eating one or two bananas a day for blood sugar and lowering your high blood pressure!

• Daily eat an ounce of dark chocolate for enjoyment as well as for beating hypertension

• Cacao acts like aspirin a day, without the dangers, and improves blood vessels

Here’s what researchers have found works for reducing or preventing high blood pressure with diet and nutrition:

A Dose of Beet Juice Beats Hypertension

The study, published online in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, could have major implications for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Professor Ahluwalia and her team found that in healthy volunteers blood pressure was reduced within just 1 hour of ingesting beet juice, with a peak drop occurring 3-4 hours after ingestion.

• Some degree of reduction continued to be observed until up to 24 hours after ingestion.

• These researchers concluded that: “Drinking beetroot juice, or consuming other nitrate-rich vegetables, might be a simple way to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system, and might also be an additional approach that one could take in the modern day battle against rising blood pressure”.

How Cocoa Improves Your Blood Vessels

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that drinking a standardized flavanol-rich cocoa beverage improved several measures of blood vessel function, especially among older study participants.

• Flavanols are the natural compounds in cocoa that are increasingly being linked to promising circulatory benefits – including improved blood flow and a reduced tendency to form damaging clots.

15 healthy young adults under age 50, and 19 healthy adults over age 50 drank a specially-made flavanol rich cocoa beverage daily for four to six days.

• At the study's completion, significant improvements in vessel function following the consumption of flavanol rich cocoa were seen in both young and older adults.

While aging has previously been shown to lead to a deterioration of blood vessel function, this study is the first to demonstrate that the consumption of flavanol-rich cocoa can improve this age-related loss of vessel function in older adults.

• As with the study using beet juice, these improvements in both young and older adults appear to be linked to the ability of cocoa flavanols to influence the body's production of nitric oxide, a key regulator of blood vessel tone.

How Nutrition Helps Hypertension: U of California

Engler's team divided 21 healthy adults into two groups. One group got a dark chocolate bar with high-cocoa content, loaded with something called epicatechin.

Epicatechin is a particularly active member of a group of compounds called plant flavoniods:

• Flavoniods keep cholesterol from gathering in blood vessels, reduce the risk of blood clots, and slow down the immune responses that lead to clogged arteries.

The second group got dark chocolate bars with the flavoniods taken out. All subjects underwent high-tech evaluation of how well the blood vessels dilate and relax -- an indictor of healthy blood vessel function. Blood vessel stiffness indicates diseased vessels and possible atherosclerosis.

• Those who got the full-flavonoid chocolate did significantly better. Why? Blood tests showed that high levels of epicatechin were coursing through their arteries.

"This is the longest clinical trial to date to show improvement in blood vessel function from consuming flavonoid-rich dark chocolate daily over an extended period of time, increasing blood flow in the artery." Engler said in a news release.

Chocolate's Like Aspirin for Blood Clots and Strokes

• The sweet treat has a similar biochemical effect to aspirin and can reduce the likelihood of blood clotting.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health made the discovery when 139 people were disqualified from a larger study looking at the effects of aspirin on blood platelets.

These "offenders" were told to refrain from indulging in a number of foods known to affect platelet activity - including chocolate. But they could not break their habit.

Professor Diane Becker said: "What these chocolate 'offenders' taught us is that the chemical in cocoa beans has a biochemical effect similar to aspirin in reducing platelet clumping, which can be fatal if a clot forms and blocks a blood vessel, causing a heart attack."

• Researchers have known for almost two decades that dark chocolate can lower blood pressure and has other beneficial effects on blood flow.

These findings, presented at the American Heart Association's annual Scientific Sessions in Chicago, identified the effect of normal, everyday doses of chocolate found in ordinary foods.

• Eating a little bit of chocolate or having a drink of hot cocoa as part of a regular diet makes sense for preventing the need for heart medications with undesirable side effects.

Anti - Hypertension DASH Diet Stops a Heart Attack

• You guessed it – eat more fruits, more veggies, more vegetable-based protein e.g. nuts, broccoli, along with more whole grains and low-fat milk than is normally eaten in the typical American diet.

• US researchers followed 88,000 healthy women for almost 25 years and concluded that a diet for lowering blood pressure can save people from heart attack and stroke.

Previous research had pointed out that such a diet could reduce risk factors, but now found that those with eating habits for lowering blood pressure were in fact:

Lonelines -- More Heart Disease and Hypertension

These terms are not medical ones, but there is some truth to them because research is showing that lonely people have a greater risk of heart disease, according to a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Researchers gave 99 male and female Ohio State University undergraduates a questionnaire to determine whether they were lonely. The researchers then monitored their blood pressure, heart rate and cardiac output while they did stressful tasks.

The tasks included math problems, and writing and giving a speech to defend themselves against a false accusation of stealing.

Blood pressure rose for both the lonely and non-lonely students during both tests. The reason for it was increased cardiac output, or the amount of blood the heart is pumping, considered a healthy response to dealing with stressful situations.

However, the lonely students had chronically higher levels of what's known as vascular resistance and lower levels of cardiac output during rest, before and after the tests.

To get at the longer-term implications of loneliness, the researchers did a second test using 25 men and women aged 53 to 78 who were generally healthy for their age.

Study co-author Louise Hawkley, a research scientist at the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, also gave this group the loneliness questionnaire.

The researchers found blood pressure was linked to age in the lonely group. The people in the oldest half of the lonely group had blood pressure that was significantly higher than the people in the younger half of the lonely group.

This finding is consistent with the idea that, through time, vascular resistance in the lonely can lead to hypertension.

In the non-lonely group, blood pressure did not show the same correlation to age and was, in fact, stable across the ages.

Researchers’ Best Tips for Beating Hypertension

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A Note To The Reader:
The ideas contained on this website are for educational purposes only, and are not intended to treat any disease, nor as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision.

The information provided is not intended to serve as health, medical, or other professional advice related to individual situations.

No therapeutic or medical claims are either implied or made. No particular results are guaranteed.

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