How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally

How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally | Expert Tips and Advice

Have you been diagnosed with high blood pressure and are looking for ways other than medicines to bring your blood pressure down? Stay tuned, I’ve got answers!

Thanks so much for reading my blog. Did you know that kidney doctors are the experts in treating high blood pressure? You may think that it’s a cardiologist, but I will argue this forever that there’s nothing better than a kidney doctor to bring your blood pressure down.

Remember, of course, though, that just because I am a kidney doctor, I am not your doctor. So this is just for informational purposes only. This is not medical advice. Don’t make any changes in your health regimen without talking to your physician or your medical practitioner.

Now, before we get to the top five tips to lower your blood pressure without medications, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: medications. So medications are an unbelievably awesome way to lower your blood pressure. They will bring that blood pressure down if you take them regularly, and I know there are a lot of barriers to taking those blood pressure medicines regularly, such as side effects, cost, and availability. But if you’ve got access to medicines, if you can afford them, and if your doctor is prescribing them, take them they will work.

Exercise

Okay, moving on now to the fun stuff. The number one way to lower your blood pressure without medications: exercise. I like to think of exercise as a miracle drug because it has a benefit throughout the whole body. Now, we don’t know exactly what type of exercise and for how long you need to exercise to lower your blood pressure. We do know that exercise helps, and if you get moving and start today, that will be a step in the right direction towards bringing that blood pressure down to a safe level.

And how much does exercise work? Well, one study suggested that exercising five times a week for 30 to 60 minutes at a time will lower that top number of your blood pressure, that systolic number, by about three to six millimeters of mercury. And that’s about the same amount that a lot of medications will work. So you can get the same benefit from exercising in a lot of cases as you would from taking that first medicine. I don’t care what you start with as far as exercising—walking, biking, jogging, yoga—it doesn’t matter to me. Talk to your doctor, make sure it’s safe for you, find out what works for you, find out what you can start and continue for the long run, and get moving today. And then once you develop an exercise routine, keep it going. Work harder, increase your time, increase your effort. All that will help you in the long run.

Losing Weight

Number two, and I say this with a lot of peace and love, losing weight can help you lower your blood pressure. Now, that’s a lot easier said than done. I know it’s not easy to lose weight. Some studies suggest that lowering your weight by one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, will lower your blood pressure by about one millimeter of mercury. Now, that number has not been proven and is certainly not the case with everybody, but we do know that obesity and weight gain raises your risk of high blood pressure. So if we can keep that weight down, it will definitely help you manage your blood pressure in the long run.

And I often tell people this, and this is key even if you can’t lose weight, try to maintain your weight. By not gaining weight, you’re actually doing your body a lot of good. Not going up is a victory celebrate it. It will help your blood pressure.

Quit Smoking

Number three, if you’re still one of those people that smokes, and I know there are a lot of you out there that still smoke, quit smoking. When you take that drag of a cigarette in the morning, that stimulates something in your body called the sympathetic nervous system. And that sympathetic nervous system makes your body go a little bit into overdrive. So your heart rate goes up, and your blood pressure goes up. It can raise your blood pressure by up to 20 millimeters of mercury, and that can last for 20 minutes.

So if your blood pressure is 130 and then you have that cigarette, it’s all the way up to 150. Now, if that’s the only cigarette you smoke in the day, your blood pressure will come down, and you will be okay the rest of the day. But let’s face it, who out there that smokes just has that one morning cigarette? So if you keep smoking throughout the day, every time you smoke, that blood pressure will go back up, and you will have continuous elevation in your blood pressure throughout the day.

And we all know that smoking also causes heart disease risk, stroke risk, lung cancer risk, COPD risk so there are lots of reasons to quit smoking other than to bring your blood pressure down. We could just add that one to the list as well. People often come into the office and say, “Oh, they want to get off their medicines.” Well, if you’re smoking, if you quit that smoking, you may be able to come off something.

Eat Less Salt

Number four, and this one is right up the Cooking Doc’s alley, eat less salt. A lot of you out there actually have hypertension that is sensitive to salt. So lower sodium leads to lower blood pressure. And if you watch any of my videos, you know that I’m a true believer that over the course of time, you can slowly lower the sodium in your diet. You have to work to change your taste buds, learn to cook at home, stop going out to restaurants as often as you usually do. You can bring your blood pressure down with a lower sodium diet.

High Potassium Food

Lastly, eat higher potassium foods. Now, this goes for people who don’t have high potassium in their blood. People who have advanced kidney disease meaning stage four or stage five or on dialysis sometimes have high potassium levels in their blood, and so they have to lower the amount of potassium in their diet. So this is not information that applies to you. But for everybody else, a higher potassium diet can lower your risk of high blood pressure and lower your risk of stroke.

Some of my favorite high potassium foods are sweet potatoes, cooked spinach, bananas, oranges, mangoes. What are your favorite high potassium foods? Oh, and tomatoes I love me some tomatoes.

High Blood Pressure Facts

High blood pressure affects up to 116 million people in the United States and up to a billion people worldwide. That can increase your risk for a whole host of diseases, anything from kidney disease to cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and strokes, to dementia. There are a whole lot of things that high blood pressure can put you at risk for. So if you can work to bring down your blood pressure, then you can lower your risk of developing all of these different diseases.

There’s not a worldwide consensus on what high blood pressure actually means, meaning what is the level of your blood pressure at which, above that, they call it hypertension or high blood pressure. For a lot of people in a lot of organizations, that number is 130 milligrams of mercury that’s the top number, the systolic number over 80. For others and for other recommendations, that blood pressure should be under 120 over 80. So there are some discrepancies in what the actual definition of high blood pressure is, and depending on your personal risk factors, you may have a different blood pressure goal.

But the bottom line is we need to keep that blood pressure at least below 140 on the top, and for a lot of you, preferentially much lower than that.