and one of the questions that I got was from someone who had changed their diet right so
they had success doing Keto and the doctor said that their blood pressure had gone up
but they didn't feel comfortable to tell the doctor that they they're doing keto
did doing keto make their blood pressure go up now when it comes to blood pressure
um a lot of people think about salt I just released a video a few months ago talking
about how your blood pressure is more of a sugar problem than a salt problem it is true that if
you have carbohydrates attracting water and salt it will put more volume in your body and
that's going to raise your blood pressure so Salt's important but what they forget
in traditional medicine is that if I have if I eat foods that are high in sugar that's going to lead
to hyperinsulinemia and hyperinsulinemia leads to sodium retention or salt retention in your kidneys
so even if you restrict salt if you consume a lot of starchy foods that lead to high insulin
you're still going to end up with high blood pressure so it so the root cause
as you know very well Violet is inflammation caused from the wrong diet leading to
hyperinsulinemia and not only are you getting more sodium retention you're going to have this
you know endothelial cell dysfunction and those cells around your art your vessels should be
making nitric oxide nitric oxide expands things so now you're not making that the inflammation
brings all these macrophages in so you have all this damage that's occurring and so if
we can get to the root cause this is the cool thing about keto we actually get rid of salt
in that dietary pattern so now not only are we not restricting salt we may have to consume some
salt just to balance things out so now I can eat fat and salt my food's gonna taste pretty
nice and and I'm also able to improve my blood pressure by focusing on sugar instead of salt so
short answer keto is good for your blood pressure it's good for your cholesterol and people who are
doing that dietary pattern should not fear that particularly since the American Heart Association
American Diabetes Association and the association of clinical Endocrinology all endorse a lower
carb diet which leads us to keto so we don't have to now a few years ago we were outliers
they were like what's wrong with Violet and Dr. Hampton what are they saying this is not good for
your heart but now the large organizations they can't deny science and the science supports this
dietary approach but the blood pressure going up could be an issue or maybe my interpretation is
it could be that because you're doing keto but maybe maybe sometimes your numbers are too high
that so you're not really in a ketogenic state so you could still have weight loss obviously because
you're doing better than standard American diet because the person says I had success on keto so
you might but maybe you just didn't you're not in keto long enough or for you to have
the full impact I think so um it is unusual to be honest to see a person doing keto and their
blood pressure goes up but but again it's it's all about what you just said the first part is
are you doing keto properly uh there are levels to this technically 50 or less is technically
um an opportunity to be in ketosis but the success rate at that level is only probably
in the 60 to 70 percent range in terms of being in true everybody's different if I have a person
who's more athletic and doing other stuff they're probably going to have an easier time than others
the success rate at 20 is near a hundred percent if you're following like if you go to a Dr. Eric
Westman at Duke who does research it's nearly 100 success rate if you're less than 20. that's why a
lot of clinicians tend to lean towards that number when they're doing therapeutic carb restriction
which is like prescription dose uh keto right so I would to heal so I mentioned the blood vessels
and nitric oxide in order for those endothelial cells to heal after years of eating a diet that
causes inflammation it sometimes takes time so I would give it more time and I would make sure
that number is low uh in terms of total carbs and is very unlikely that that's gonna um uh not real
success having said that I have a nest acronym nutrition exercise less stress more sleep how we
think recovering from trauma as the nest maybe you need to also look at those other aspects of your
life which is why I think broader so maybe I need to start adding the optimizing of my sleep to the
equation because if I don't get enough sleep as an example when you look at research you get you
get like four or five hours of sleep your next day you're for 12 hours your pressure is going to be
higher if you just in the next day so if you're going to see your doctor if you're going to see
Dr. Hampton make sure you get enough sleep because your pressure is going to probably be higher so so
you want to start looking at those other things and when you're making dietary changes there's
stress your body is under stress because it's not accustomed to you going in a completely different
direction our body likes to be you know it likes homeostasis it likes things to be where they are
so when you start changing that's a stressor to your body even though it's a good stressor
but usually once the dust settles everything settles down and you can do much better after that