TWO INTERESTING WAYS TO REDUCE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE WITHOUT MEDICATION!
Learn how you can lower your blood-pressure by using 2 natural methods
If you lined up all the blood vessels in your body, they’d be 60 thousand miles long. And every day, they carry the equivalent of over two thousand gallons of blood to the body’s tissues.
In this blog I will teach you about 2 interesting ways you can reduce your blood-pressure without using any medication. If you’d prefer to watch than read, then you can find my video summary below.
So it makes sense with starting by understanding what blood-pressure really is, and it’s quite simple:
‘The pressure of the circulating blood within your arteries’
It is estimated around a third of all adults in the UK have high blood-pressure (hypertension).
The NHS has an easy to read guide to high blood-pressure which you should check out here. Simply put, high blood pressure is problematic for your whole body. We’ve known this for years, so it’s no surprise that the data gathered on high blood-pressure shows just how devastating its effects can be.
According to ‘The Global Burden of Disease 2015’ report, high blood-pressure is third biggest risk factor after diet and smoking for chronic disease. For cardiovascular disease, it is the number one risk factor, increasing the risk of the following substantially:
▪️Heart disease
■Heart-failure
■Heart attacks
◼︎Stroke
◼︎Kidney disease
HOW DO WE TREAT IT?
‘No ifs, buts or maybes, we only deal in absolutes’ a football fan once said, and never has that saying been truer here. We absolutely know that the number 1 way to reduce blood-pressure is through lifestyle changes. Since the majority of high blood-pressure is classified as ‘primary’, meaning it comes from poor lifestyle, then the ultimate treatment to reverse it is to address those poor lifestyle decisions.
This means, cut out as much processed and refined foods from your diet. Cut out bread, pasta, sweets, beer, fizzy drinks and processed meats.
It isn’t rocket science.
Yet despite the ease at which this problem could be fixed, many people end up requiring the help of prescription medication. Not just one, sometimes up to 3 different blood-pressure medication tablets.
Although they can be very effective, they don’t come without their side-effects and interactions.
So let’s discover 2 interesting ways you can reduce your blood-pressure without medication…
SUN EXPOSURE
A really easy way to naturally reduce your blood-pressure is getting adequate sun-exposure.
When you expose your body to the sun for at least 15 minutes, the energy derived stimulates the synthesis of a molecule called nitric oxide (NO) within the walls of your blood-vessels.
Nitric oxide is a fascinating molecule and the presence of it results in your blood-vessels undergoing a process called ‘vasodilation’. This is just a fancy way of saying that your blood vessels open up, which in turn reduces the blood-pressure within.
You can see this in action when you’re in a warm country or you’ve just exercised. All you have to do is find some veins (the arm or calves are good spots) and see how big ‘n’ juicy they look compared to normal.
This is nitric oxide at work!
GARLIC EXTRACT SUPPLEMENTATION
Humans have known for thousands of years about the amazing medicinal properties of garlic. It is a potent anti-oxidant, great for the immune-system and an anti-inflammatory.
Now a 2020 meta-analysis sheds light on the blood-pressure lowering effects of this amazing plant.
The meta-analysis studied 12 trials including 553 hypertensive patients and found that garlic extract supplemenation lowered blood-pressure ‘similarly to standard anti-hypertensive medications.’
The authors also suggested the ‘reduction in blood pressure was associated with a 16-40% reduction in the risk of suffering from cardiovascular events’.
SUMMARY
I hope to cover even more natural ways to reduce blood-pressure in the future as there are many herbs, spices and plants that have a strong evidence-base behind them.
To make sure you don’t miss out on this, please follow our social media channels where you’ll also get to enjoy our videos (which we love making).
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As always herbalists: small changes, healthy habits, happy lives
Thanks for reading,
Haris