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  If you suddenly find you have high blood pressure, be sure to check with your doctor to rule out heavy metal poisoning (i.e., lead, mercury, cadmium) and kidney disease.

  Weight Loss and Exercise

  If you are overweight, the first and most important step in lowering blood pressure, even if it is genetic, is to lose weight. People with high blood pressure weigh an average of 29 pounds more than people with normal blood pressure. For every 2 pounds of weight you drop, your blood pressure will drop at least 1 point in both the systolic and diastolic readings.

  The natural partner of weight loss is exercise, which also improves circulation. If you exercise, you are 34 percent less likely to develop hyper-tension than if you’re a couch potato. Just a brisk half-hour walk three or four times a week can lower blood pressure from 3 to 15 points in three months. Exercise will also help reduce stress, an important component in hypertension.

  The Six Core Principles for Optimal Health are your foundation for treating hypertension naturally. When you’re treating hypertension, it’s especially important to keep your antioxidant levels high, eat plenty of fiber-filled vegetables and whole grains, and drink plenty of water.

  Keep sodium, Potassium, Magnesium, and Sugar in Balance

  For about 30 percent of the population, reducing salt in the diet will help lower blood pressure naturally. Keep your salt intake moderate regardless, at 2,000 to 3,000 mg per day. Studies have shown that an extremely low-sodium diet causes more problems than it solves, so don’t overdo it. Excessively low sodium, also called hyponatremia, is most common among elderly women and is poorly recognized by doctors. Hyponatremia can be caused by many drugs, but especially the diuretics, SSRI antidepressants, and antipsychotic and antiepileptic drugs. Hyponatremia can be hard to recognize because, especially in the elderly, the symptoms can be attributed to so many other factors, but they can include nausea, loss of appetite, fatigue, lethargy, muscle cramps, headache, confusion, and when severe, delirium, seizures, coma, and respiratory arrest. Remember, only 30 percent of the population have high blood pressure that’s helped by a low-sodium diet—the rest of us simply need to be moderate in our salt intake. If you avoid processed foods, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get too much salt in your diet.

  Reducing your salt intake won’t be effective unless your potassium intake is also high, and yet people who take diuretic drugs to treat hypertension often become potassium-deficient. Signs of potassium deficiency include muscle cramps, weakness, and an irregular heartbeat. Since potassium supplements may cause problems of their own, including diarrhea and nausea, eating a potassium-rich diet is the best way to maintain healthy potassium levels. Most fresh fruits and vegetables contain potassium. Those highest in potassium are bananas, apples, avocados, lima beans, oranges, potatoes, tomatoes, peaches, cantaloupes, and apricots. Fish and meats also contain potassium.

  Sufficient magnesium is essential for healthy blood pressure. It plays a key role, with sodium and potassium, in maintaining fluid balance in the cells and regulating how much water the cells hold. When your cells are holding onto water, your blood pressure can go up. Just taking a magnesium supplement can significantly reduce blood pressure. Magnesium deficiency can cause a variety of heart problems, including irregular heartbeat, and it contributes to diabetes.

  Recent research shows that beet juice can help reduce blood pressure. An article published in the journal Hypertension found that three hours after intake of 2 cups of beet juice, blood pressure was lowered by an average of 10 points, which is about what you will achieve with most blood-pressure-lowering drugs. Researchers concluded that natural nitrates in the beet juice converted to nitrites, which increased nitric oxide levels, which relaxed blood vessels and lowered blood pressure. Pomegranate juice, dark grape juice, and dark chocolate may have similar effects. When you purchase commercial fruit juices, be sure that they are minimally sweetened and do not contain corn sweeteners, which can cause unstable blood sugar and excessive weight gain.

  Cutting way back on sugar and refined carbohydrates such as white flour may be as important as cutting down on the salt. The insulin and adrenaline released when your blood sugar spikes cause the body to retain sodium and hold water, which raises blood pressure.

  Coffee also stimulates the release of adrenal hormones and can cause a rise in blood pressure.

  The Best Cure-All

  One of the best ways to reduce blood pressure, which you may find hard to believe because it’s so simple, is to drink plenty of clean water.

  Stress Hormones Raise Blood Pressure

  If you do all of the preceding and your blood pressure is still high, take a good look at the stress in your life and take steps to manage it better or reduce it. The adrenal hormones released when you’re under stress automatically raise blood pressure; so if you’re chronically stressed, you may have chronic hypertension.

  A Natural Blood-Pressure-Lowering Program

  Maintain a healthy weight.

  Get some moderate exercise at least 30 minutes every day or 45 minutes three to four times a week.

  Eat a low-fat, moderate-sodium, low-sugar diet emphasizing whole, fresh foods, especially vegetables, grains, and plenty of fiber.

  Avoid refined, packaged, and processed foods.

  Limit alcohol consumption to two drinks per day or less.

  Avoid coffee.

  Stop smoking.

  Avoid drugs that raise blood pressure.

  Drink plenty of water.

  Daily Vitamins (add to the basic vitamin plan in Chapter 9)

  Vitamin C, 1,000 to 2,000 mg (reduce the dose if it causes diarrhea)

  Vitamin E, 400 IU daily (800 IU total)

  Magnesium, 500 to 800 mg

  Calcium, up to 500 mg

  Zinc, 10 mg daily

  Carnitine, up to 1,000 mg, three to four times daily between meals

  CoQ10, 30 to 90 mg daily

  Herbs

  You can take these herbs alone or in a formula that combines them. They come as tablets, as capsules, or in a liquid tincture. Check with your pharmacist about any herb-drug interactions that might be a concern if you’re taking one or more prescription or nonprescription medications.

  Cayenne

  Dandelion (acts as a diuretic)

  Dong quai

  Garlic (eat fresh or take the odorless pills three times a day)

  Gingko biloba (improves blood flow to the extremities)

  Ginseng

  Hawthorn (strengthens the heart)

  Foods

  Fresh fruits and vegetables

  Fresh celery (four stalks a day has been known to significantly reduce blood pressure—try drinking a carrot and celery juice mix daily)

  Cold-water, deep-sea fish (cod, mackerel, sardines, salmon, herring)

  Olive oil (instead of vegetable oils or butter)

  Onions

  Reducing stress may mean cutting down on your commitments, getting more sleep, or making more time for recreation. Managing stress better may mean learning how to meditate; learning relaxation exercises; taking yoga, tai chi, or qi gong classes; or talking to a friend or therapist. Most of us know exactly what our life stressors are. It’s a matter of making your health and well-being important enough to make the needed changes.

  Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs and Their Natural Alternatives

  Cholesterol is a fatlike material that is found in the brain, nerves, blood, bile, and liver. Although it has been a victim of negative press, it is an essential component in the production of the steroid hormones and in nerve function as well as other essential body processes. When it is present in the blood in excess and in one of its destructive oxidated forms (e.g., LDL), it is one of many contributors to hardening of the arteries, or arteriosclerosis, better known as heart disease.

  If you do a study of heart disease patients and cholesterol, you will find that cholesterol levels are higher in those with heart disease, and you will find cholesterol-laden fatty deposits blocking t
he arteries of many people with heart disease. But to then assume that simply lowering cholesterol levels will make heart disease go away is a huge fallacy. High cholesterol does not cause heart disease; it is a symptom of heart disease! When you get a high cholesterol reading on a blood test, that can be an early warning signal that you need to take better care of yourself, but it’s certainly not a reason to take cholesterol-lowering drugs before you’ve given diet, exercise, and supplements a good try.

  Heart disease isn’t the only disease that causes high levels of blood cholesterol. Diabetes, hypothyroidism, kidney disease, and liver disease can also significantly raise cholesterol levels. Your doctor should first rule out these diseases as a cause of high cholesterol before prescribing you a cholesterol-lowering drug.

  Debunking the Cholesterol Myths

  In 2001, a federally sponsored report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association strongly urged that the 13 million Americans taking statin drugs should be joined by 23 million more. According to this report, taking such a step would offer Americans effective protection against ever having a heart attack. With this strong a push from mainstream medicine in favor of pharmaceutical cholesterol control, it’s hard to keep a clear head on the real facts about cholesterol. Unfortunately this bastion of “evidence-based medicine” has no evidence to back up this claim. We’d like to set the record straight for you.

  Since the publication of the famous Seven Countries Study in the 1970s, the notion that a diet high in animal fat and cholesterol amplifies the risk of suffering a fatal heart attack has been virtual gospel in mainstream medicine. Reports from the early years of the ongoing Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), involving over 360,000 men, cemented the notion that a diagnosis of high blood cholesterol greatly increases heart attack risk. Scores of smaller studies appeared to further support the diet-heart hypothesis that a high-cholesterol diet causes high blood cholesterol and that high blood cholesterol causes heart disease.

  As a result, mainstream medicine has adopted cholesterol-lowering therapies as its first-line defense against heart attack. Millions of people swallow drugs each day to keep their cholesterol low, and drug companies continue to campaign aggressively to get more people to take these medications. Millions have reduced or eliminated sources of animal fat from their diets to reduce their cholesterol consumption, thinking that replacing those foods with vegetable oils, grain-based foods, and low-fat versions of other foods will protect them against heart attack—still the number one cause of death in the United States.

  The first problem with this approach is that the diet-heart hypothesis is a myth. Nearly all of the studies frequently cited as supportive of the diet-heart hypothesis are, in fact, methodologically or statistically weak. The second problem is that the focus on cholesterol control has caused much of the medical research community to quit seeking out other avenues for heart disease prevention and to pay only lip service to the lifestyle modifications that truly work to prevent heart attacks.

  Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., is a Swedish physician and researcher who has eloquently debunked the cholesterol hypothesis in his book The Cholesterol Myths (New Trends Publishing, 2000). Dr. Ravnskov points out that according to the graphs created by Dr. Ancel Keys and the other authors of the Seven Countries Study, the correlation between risk of fatal heart attack and fat consumption seems inarguable. The lower the fat consumption, the less people died from heart attacks, and vice versa. Each country appears to fall perfectly in place on the curve. He also points out that a total of 22 countries were evaluated for this study, and only 7 were included in the final work. If all 22 had been included, the points on the graph would have looked more like a scatterplot than a straight, strong, upwardly curving line.

  Dr. Ravnskov also discusses the MRFIT trial, which found that those with the highest blood cholesterol levels (over 265 mg/dL) had an incredible 433 percent greater risk of fatal heart attack than those with the lowest (under 170 mg/dL). A closer look at this study reveals that the researchers’ choice to express risk in this manner exaggerates the actual difference between the groups. While 1.3 percent of the subjects with the highest cholesterol levels died from heart attack during the six years of the study, 0.3 percent of the subjects with the lowest levels also died from heart attack. While 1.3 is 433 percent greater than 0.3, the fact is 98.7 percent of the highest cholesterol group did not die of heart attack, and 99.7 percent of the lowest cholesterol group also did not die of heart attack. When you look at it this way, there is only a 1 percent difference between the two groups!

  The evidence that contradicts the diet-heart hypothesis is more solid than the evidence that supports it. In the Framingham, Massachusetts, population—a group of thousands of people who are the subjects of ongoing research on several chronic diseases—the cholesterol levels of people who had heart attacks were almost as likely to be low as high. Other studies imply that high cholesterol is protective against heart disease mortality in elderly men and women and that very low cholesterol can be dangerous in women. Cattle-herding Masai in Kenya—who live on diets that consist almost entirely of flesh foods—have some of the lowest blood cholesterol levels and rates of death from heart disease on the planet. A majority of individuals who suffer heart attacks have blood cholesterol levels that fall within the range of normal, while many with high cholesterol never suffer a heart attack.

  How Low Is Too Low?

  There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that normal cholesterol floating around in the blood does any harm. In fact, cholesterol is the building block for all your steroid hormones, which includes all the sex hormones and the cortisones. Even slightly low levels of cholesterol are associated with depression, suicide, and lung cancer in older women. A study in Great Britain found that low levels of cholesterol can cause schizophrenia. A controversial article published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2007 suggests that people who take statins and have very low cholesterol levels have a higher risk of cancer, finding “. . . a highly significant inverse relationship between achieved LDL-C levels and rates of newly diagnosed cancer.” In other words, the lower the number, the higher the risk of cancer. Or to put it another way, there may be some benefit to normalizing cholesterol levels, but taking cholesterol below normal may be risky. What will harm you is oxidized cholesterol, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

  Does Eating High-Cholesterol Foods Raise Cholesterol Levels?

  How about the myth that eating high-cholesterol foods raises cholesterol levels? This is true for only about 30 percent of the population. For most people, eating high-cholesterol foods does not raise cholesterol. The body manufactures about 75 percent of its own cholesterol from the breakdown products of foods we eat, primarily sugars and carbohydrates. The rest we get directly from what we eat, meaning foods that contain cholesterol. If we eat more cholesterol, the body makes less or it is broken down by the liver and excreted. People who eat extremely excessive amounts of cholesterol-containing foods so that the body is unable to keep up with the elimination process or people whose livers are not functioning properly may have high cholesterol due to their eating habits, but this is an exception, not the rule. OK, if you’re having bacon for breakfast, a hamburger for lunch, and steak for dinner, your cholesterol might go up!

  If you want to find out if you are one of the 30 percent for whom eating cholesterol does raise blood levels, try this. Have your HDL and LDL cholesterol levels measured; then cut way down on high-cholesterol foods for three months. After the three months, go back and have your cholesterol levels measured again. If your cholesterol count is influenced by your cholesterol intake, your LDL (bad) cholesterol level should have dropped and your HDL levels should be the same or higher.

  If Cholesterol Doesn’t Cause Heart Disease, What Does?

  Heart disease has multiple causes that most Americans are familiar with by now. The most familiar is diet. But why is diet so important? Why do people who eat lots of vegeta
bles and less red meat have healthier hearts? Primarily because people who eat that way also tend to eat less sugar and refined carbohydrates, foods that powerfully promote the oxidation, inflammation, and nutritional deficiencies that are the foundation for most heart disease.

  If you want to dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease, and every other chronic disease that’s rampant in Westernized countries such as diabetes and arthritis, then dramatically reduce your consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates. The easiest way to accomplish that is to avoid processed foods.

  Vegetables are powerful weapons against heart disease. They are high in antioxidants and hundreds of phytochemicals (plant chemicals) that are natural artery “Roto-Rooters” that disarm harmful oxidized cholesterol and keep it from clogging arteries. Vegetables are also high in fiber, which helps sweep toxins out of your digestive system.

  Another potent risk factor for heart disease is low glutathione levels, which interfere with the body’s ability to clear out harmful types of cholesterol and toxins that damage arteries.

  Some villains in the heart disease drama directly harm artery walls. One of these villains is high homocysteine levels, often caused by a deficiency of B vitamins. Another such villain is rancid oil, such as unsaturated vegetable oils teeming with unstable molecules.

  The partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are equally if not more toxic to the heart, and although they’ve almost been eliminated from supermarket shelves, they’re still widely found in fried fast food.

  Low magnesium levels do damage by weakening the heart muscles and interfering with nerve impulses and heartbeat.

  And we all know by now that depression, high levels of chronic unresolved stress, and lack of exercise are potent risk factors for heart disease.