- Hey, this is Dr. Berry.
Let's talk for a few minutes
about something that's very very important
how to lower your blood pressure naturally.
It's estimated that about 75 million people
in the United States,
suffer from hypertension or high blood pressure.
And they take, if they've been diagnosed properly,
they take one or two or three different medications for this
every single day.
And you may know that each medication
comes with a long list of potential side effects
and if you double your medication or triple them,
you don't just double or triple the potential side effects,
you multiply them.
And so, let's talk about this,
and if you know someone who suffers from hypertension
or high blood pressure,
please take a moment and share this video with them,
share it, you can click the share button
and share it on Facebook,
you can send an email,
you can send a text message,
there's multiple ways that you can get this message to them
so that they don't have to
keep taking a handful of medications,
but they also don't have to keep suffering
from the increased risk of heart attack and stroke
that uncontrolled high blood pressure will bring them.
Now I'm gonna talk to you about seven principles
of lowering your blood pressure naturally
and then at the very end of this video,
I'm gonna tell you three myths
that you can completely ignore
when it comes to lowering your blood pressure.
So let's jump right in.
First and foremost,
the first principle is chronically high insulin levels.
Now this has been known,
it's published in multiple research articles
that a chronically high insulin level
is going to make your blood pressure higher.
We don't know 100% for sure
if this is a causation or a corelation,
but it sure looks causal to me
when I look at all the research,
that a high insulin level
leads to an elevation in blood pressure.
For a couple of reasons.
First of all,
when you have a chronically high insulin level,
you just tend to hold more fluid, more water in your body,
and that's gonna increase your intravascular volume
and that's gonna increase your blood pressure.
Secondly, chronically high insulin levels
and the chronically high blood sugar levels
that lead to an elevated insulin,
will cause inflammation, okay,
and this leads to the damage
inside the tiny arterials and capillaries
and that's gonna ultimate lead
to a heart attack or a stroke.
And so you've gotta work on lowering your insulin level.
to as low a normal level as you can get.
That's gonna protect you
from hundreds of complications as you go through life
but it's also gonna lower your blood pressure.
There are a couple of big diets
that I've researched and used over the years
to try to control hypertension or high blood pressure.
One didn't work at all,
the other works great.
The first diet is the dash diet,
this is the diet recommended
by the American Heart Association.
It recommends lowering your salt and your fat
and I used it for the first few years I was in practice
and I found that it had basically zero effect
on my patients blood pressure.
It didn't help them lose weight,
it didn't lower their insulin levels,
it didn't lower their inflammation levels,
and it didn't help with their blood pressure.
I just kept adding more and more pills
to their high blood pressure regimen.
And so I don't recommend the dash diet anymore.
When I discovered the ketogenic way of eating
or the low carb/high healthy fat way of eating,
I immediately saw my patient's insulin levels come down,
their inflammation levels came down,
their blood pressure came down.
I was able to stop medications that they were taking,
two, three, four medications a day,
they were able to start stopping those
and they also lost weight.
So there's that.
But the ketogenic way of eating
or the low carb/high healthy fat way of eating
is the best way I have ever found
in my years of medical practice,
to lower an insulin level to a low normal level
which is going to reverse hypertension
or high blood pressure
and also diabetes and all kinds of other stuff as well.
The second principle is inflammation.
You do not want chronic inflammation in your body,
this is gonna lead to all the damage
that leads to all the secondary bad outcomes.
But it's also gonna keep your blood pressure higher, okay,
and once again, the ketogenic way of eating
is the most uninflammatory diet
that I've ever used personally
or recommended to my patients.
It has almost miraculous antiinflammatory benefits
when you remove the slow poisons
of all the sugars, all the grains,
and all the vegetable oils from a human's diet,
they just start to heal and get better.
And they lower their insulin level
which gets rid of all the extra fluid
that lowers the blood pressure,
they also get rid of the chronic inflammation.
This can be inflammation in their gut,
in their brain, in their joints,
or many many other places in the body
including those tiny arterials
that feed the heart, the brain, and the other vial organs.
So lowering the inflammation is vital.
You have to get inflammatory things out your diet
and out of your life.
Anything that chronically inflames you is bad
and you need to get that out of your life, okay.
Next is a mineral, magnesium.
There are multiple medical studies that show without doubt
that getting enough magnesium in your diet
is gonna help keep your blood pressure lower naturally.
And on the ketogenic way of eating,
there are multiple foods that are keto friendly
that you can eat to have a good supply of magnesium.
The dark leafy greens, the meats, the nuts,
and I'm gonna link to a video
that talks about the seven keto foods
that you can get plenty of magnesium
because so many people in the US and in the world
are deficient in magnesium.
This will cause your blood pressure
to just be naturally higher
and you don't want that.
Next is potassium.
Again, multiple medical studies
show that when your potassium levels are optimal,
your blood pressure is lower.
And I also have a video about this,
about the seven ketogenic foods
that will give you plenty of potassium.
You can check that video out after you finish this one
'cause you don't wanna miss those three myths
at the end that I'm gonna talk about.
Next is stress and by this I don't mean acute good stress
like learning to play the piano or starting a new job,
I'm talking about chronic bad daily stress
that keeps your adrenaline or your epinephrine levels high,
that keeps your cortisol levels high.
If you've got chronic bad stress in your life,
you've gotta work on that.
Neisha and I have talked about strategies
for lowering chronic bad stress
on several of our Facebook live videos on my Facebook page,
you can check those out.
But you have to develop strategies
to get rid of the chronic bad stress in your life.
That's going to lower your cortisol levels
and lower your chronically elevated adrenaline levels
and that's gonna lower your blood pressure.
Next is sleep.
I've got a video I'm working on for sleep
that should be posted on this channel
by the end of November 2018
that you can check out.
I don't have it on here yet.
But if you're not sleeping well at night,
it's gonna make your blood pressure higher.
Sleep apnea is one of the leading causes
of secondary hypertension
in Americans and in the world.
If you're overweight,
if you're chronically inflamed,
if your insulin levels are chronically high,
you're more likely to have sleep apnea.
And that's just one of the ways
that getting poor sleep can raise your blood pressure.
If you don't sleep well at night
or whenever you sleep,
then your adrenaline levels are gonna chronically be higher,
your cortisol levels, your insulin levels.
You're gonna be tired
and when you're tired and grumpy from not sleeping well,
that makes it much easier
to reach and grab some crappy carbage,
some carbohydrates that you don't need,
some processed foods, some grains, some sugar,
where as if you slept well,
when you're alert and you're really really awake,
you're much more able to make better decisions
when it comes to your diet.
So you've got to follow the principles
of getting good sleep,
you have to have meticulous sleep hygiene,
especially as you get older.
When you're 17, you can sleep deeply,
and someone can come and just kick you out of the bed
and you don't even wake up, you just keep sleeping, right.
But as you get older, it gets harder and harder
to get those seven to nine hours of good deep quality sleep
and that's vital for keeping your blood pressure lower.
The last principle is alcohol.
Now, if you're young and healthy
and you don't have blood pressure problems,
you can have a mixed drink or two
that's carb-free every night,
and that's not a big deal, right.
But as you get older, as you get more insulin resistant,
as you get more chronic inflammation,
as you get more stress in your life,
the alcohol,
especially if you take one or two or three medications
for your blood pressure,
you gotta stop the alcohol, I'm sorry.
And now once you've taken care of all of these principles
and gotten your blood pressure
and your weight and your insulin and everything fixed,
you may be able to go back and have a mixed drink or two
that's carb-free every now and then
and it not be a big deal.
But why in the world
would you wanna have two or three drinks at night
if that's contributing to your high blood pressure
and you can stop that voluntarily
and maybe get of one or two or three medications.
So if you're currently on any medication
for hypertension,
for high blood pressure,
don't stop those medications
without going to see your doctor.
You can start implementing these seven principles right now
to start to lower your blood pressure immediately
but don't stop medications
until you talk to your doctor about your plan.
And also start keeping up with your blood pressure.
You wanna get a blood pressure cuff at home
that checks on your upper arm, not on your wrist,
and you wanna check your blood pressure twice a day
when you're calm, cool, and relaxed.
You don't wanna be in pain,
you don't wanna be pissed off,
you don't wanna be super tired
when you check your blood pressure,
it's going to be high, that's normal.
Also, don't let your doctor start a blood pressure medicine
if you're rushed and you go to the doctor's office
and they rush you in and set you down
and check the blood pressure,
and duh, it's high because you're under stress
and you're rushed and you're kinda mad.
A lot of doctors will inappropriately start you
on a blood pressure medicine
based on that one blood pressure reading.
That is inappropriate, that is not proper medical practice,
do not allow that to happen.
Now if your blood pressure
is running consistently high at home right now,
you might need a temporary medication or two
to get that blood pressure down.
But when you follow these seven principles for long enough,
you're gonna be able to get off most,
if not all of that blood pressure medication.
But you're gonna do it hand in hand
with a learned health advisor,
which is your doctor.
Okay, also your doctor needs to rule out other causes
of secondary hypertension like sleep apnea
and there's several other ones
that involve the kidneys and the adrenal glands,
but if you have a secondary cause of high blood pressure,
you may have to be on a medication or two
and that's just how it's gonna be.
But most people, if they'll follow these seven principles,
they don't need any blood pressure medication whatsoever.
Okay.
Now let's talk about the three myths
that you hear all the time in the media
and maybe even from your doctor
if he's behind on his reading.
Number one is,
the number one myth is salt.
Oh salt, if you eat salt,
it'll make your blood pressure go up.
This has been proven incorrect multiple multiple times
in huge medical studies.
My good friend Dr. James DiNicolantonio
has a great book about this called, The Salt Fix,
I'll put a link down below.
Don't worry about salt.
Maybe one or two people out of a million
have a genetic predisposition
and are very salt sensitive,
but once you've worked on these seven principles
that I've talked about earlier,
salt is gonna have no meaningful effect
on your blood pressure whatsoever.
You can enjoy your salt,
that's how we get our minerals,
don't worry about salt.
The second myth is caffeine.
Oh if you drink coffee or tea,
you're gonna raise your blood pressure.
This has been shown multiple times to not be true.
You might have a transient elevation
in your pulse and blood pressure, short term,
when you drink a cup of coffee,
but that's not the definition of hypertension
or high blood pressure.
That has nothing to do with the big picture.
There's so many good benefits
to drinking a good quality coffee or tea,
don't worry about them raising your blood pressure,
that's a myth.
Then the third myth,
this is kind of a complicated myth
and so listen carefully.
Many many of them, the American Heart Association,
the American Medical Association,
imply that smoking will raise your blood pressure.
And as much as doctors would love for this to be true,
as much as we would love to have one more thing
we can throw on the pile of reasons
why you should quit smoking,
is that it raises your blood pressure.
But we've tried in multiple large studies
and we can't prove that it increases your blood pressure
in any meaningful way.
Now, I strongly encourage you to stop smoking.
I have a video on this channel
about vaping instead of smoking
and how that's 100 times safer.
It's not ideal, but it's safer.
You can check that video out.
But smoking is terrible for you
in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways
but it doesn't raise your blood pressure.
So that's one less thing to worry about
but I still want you to quit smoking, okay.
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This is Dr. Berry, I'll see ya next time.