Posts Tagged ‘blood pressure’

Chili Peppers Could Lower Your Blood Pressure

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

by Dave Thier

Chomping down on a habanero may have more subtle benefits than bragging rights. According to a new study, capsaicin, the compound that makes hot peppers spicy, may also lower your blood pressure.

The study, published in this month’s Cell Metabolism journal, found that long-term consumption of capsaicin relaxed blood vessels in genetically hypertensive rats. Researcher Zhiming Zhu of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, noticed that population studies with humans suggest a similar phenomenon: Hypertension rates are only 10 to 14 percent in his native southwestern China, where people regularly eat spicy foods, as opposed to 20 percent in the comparatively bland north.  (more…)

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HEART, VASCULAR, CHOLESTEROL, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND DIABETES—WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON

Monday, March 8th, 2010

HEART, VASCULAR, CHOLESTEROL, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND DIABETES—WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON 
Terry Chappell, MD 
Celebration of Health Association 
Bluffton, Ohio 
419-358-4627 
www.healthcelebration.com 
 
  The first considerations are diet, exercise and stress control to prevent or treat the various diseases of circulation. Blood pressure is very important, even more so from recent studies. Cholesterol and other lipids are a factor, but only one of many. Half of those who die of heart atttacks have normal cholesterols. If your HDL (the good cholesterol) is low, you really need to exercise. For primary prevention you have to treat 100 people with high cholesterol with a statin drug to prevent one heart atttack. Statins do help some to prevent heart attacks and strokes, but usually red yeast does as well. Either way, it is very important that you take some CoEnzyme Q10, because you lose it when you take these substances and you need it for a healthy heart. 
  Non-insulin dependent diabetes is largely preventable or at least controllable with diet. For most patients, I suggest a restricted carbohydrate diet. Dieticians have been shown to be wrong in the past. Studies show that the a low carbohydrate diet works better than an exchange diet to control diabetes. A raw food diet is difficult, but the results might even be better. There are some excellent herbal and nutrient preparations that can help with BP, lipids, and blood sugar control but nothing that will take the place of diet, exercise and stress control. 
  In my experience, three of the most important factors in preventing circulation problems and heart attacks are preventing abnormal clotting without increasing the risk of hemorrhage, reducing inflammation and removing toxic metals, especially lead and mercury. Intravenous EDTA chelation therapy does all three, I think better and safer than any other treatment program. If clotting is a risk, we often add nattokinase and fish oils. Plavix carries too big a risk of brain hemorrhage for routine use. For inflammation, statin drugs are more dangerous. There is no conclusive evidence that they work any better than fish oils, EDTA, and perhaps some proteolytic enzymes. Nothing is as broad as EDTA for removing toxic metals. The American Heart Association journal has repeatedly demonstrated that even small amounts of lead dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. And yet the authors declined to recommend any treatment for it. We treat it early and vigorously because we feel elevated lead is a big factor that deserves attention.

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Fructose May Raise Blood Pressure

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

By HealthDay – Fri Oct 30, 8:49 PM PDT

- FRIDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) — Here’s a new reason to put down that sugary soft drink: Research suggests that a diet high in fructose, a common sweetener, boosts the risk of high blood pressure.

High-fructose corn syrup is found in many processed foods and beverages. Americans consume 30 percent more fructose now than 20 years ago, and researchers have linked higher fructose consumption to the growing obesity epidemic. But scientists weren’t sure if a connection existed between fructose consumption and high blood pressure.

In a new study, Dr. Diana Jalal, of the University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center, and colleagues studied 4,528 adults without a history of high blood pressure. They examined their fructose intake and found that those who consumed more than 74 grams of fructose per day — that’s the equivalent of the amount in 2.5 sweetened soft drinks — boosted their risk of high blood pressure by 28 percent to 87 percent, depending on the level of hypertension.

“These results indicate that high fructose intake in the form of added sugars is significantly and independently associated with higher blood pressure levels in the U.S. adult population with no previous history of hypertension,” the study authors wrote, adding that future research is needed to determine if lowering fructose intake will also lower blood pressure.

The study findings were scheduled to be presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting, held Oct. 27 to Nov. 1 in San Diego.

More information

Learn about high blood pressure from the American Heart Association.

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Whole Grains May Help Keep Blood Pressure in Check

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Eating lots of whole grains could ward off high blood pressure, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In the study, men with the highest whole-grain consumption were 19 percent less likely to develop high blood pressure than men who ate the least amount of whole grains.

While refining grains removes their outer coating, whole grains retain their bran and germ, so they are richer in many nutrients, Dr. Alan J. Flint of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and his colleagues note in their report.

The most recent U.S. guidelines recommend that people get at least 3 ounces, or 85 grams, of whole grains daily, and that they consume at least half of their grains as whole grains.

There’s evidence, the investigators note, that women who eat more whole grains are less likely to develop high blood pressure, also called hypertension, but there is less information on how whole grains might affect men’s heart health. (more…)

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Salt May Be Culprit for Uncontrolled Blood Pressure

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Tuesday, July 21, 2009People with high blood pressure that isn’t controlled by multiple medications are likely eating too much salt, new findings in the journal Hypertension show.

Individuals with so-called resistant hypertension showed sharp reductions in their blood pressure when they dramatically cut their salt intake, Dr. Eduardo Pimenta of the University of Queensland School of Medicine in Brisbane, Australia and his colleagues found.

“It was an amazingly large reduction in blood pressure,” Dr. Lawrence J. Appel of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, told Reuters Health. Appel estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of people have resistant hypertension, meaning they are taking three or more blood pressure medications but their blood pressure is still too high.

But the reductions in sodium intake in Pimenta’s study-down to 1.15 grams per day-would be very tough for people to achieve in a real-world setting, Appel added. (Sodium levels in food are correlated with salt levels.) “You can advise people to reduce sodium but the food supply has so much sodium it’s very difficult for individuals to do this on their own.”

Pimenta and his team had 12 people with resistant hypertension alternate between low and high sodium diets for a week each, with a two-week “washout” period between the diets.

Study participants’ initial average systolic blood pressure, the top number in a blood pressure reading, was 145.8 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg), while diastolic pressure, the lower reading, was 83.9 mm Hg. They were taking an average of 3.4 antihypertensive medications each.

On the high sodium diet, they were consuming 5.7 grams of sodium daily, while the low-sodium diet contained 1.15 grams of sodium daily.

US and UK guidelines recommend people consume less than 6 grams of sodium daily, while the World Health Organization recommends reducing intake even further, to less than 5 grams. But people in the developed world typically consume 9 to 12 grams of sodium a day.

In the study by Pimenta and his team, going on the low-salt diet reduced people’s systolic blood pressure by 22.7 mm Hg, on average, and their diastolic pressure by 9.1 mm Hg. (more…)

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