Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally
These smart strategies can get your numbers down
Published in health •self_care •METRO •METRO Story | 0 Comments, Talk about this article »
For Janine Punales, a trip to the doctor for a simple cold became a lifesaving experience.
“I mentioned I’d been experiencing anxiety, so the nurse took my blood pressure,” recalls the 29-year-old Flemington, New Jersey, insurance underwriter. It was 140/108—stage 2 hypertension.
Her doctor told her that she might have to go on medication to bring her pressure down. Suddenly, Punales’ free-floating anxiety found a place to land. She was now one of the 73 million American adults with high blood pressure (any reading above 120/80). “I felt like a ticking time bomb,” she says. “I was so anxious I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t believe that here I was, only 29 years old. I couldn’t be that unhealthy.”
But family history was working against her. Her father has a heart condition, and a few months before Punales’ diagnosis, her mother was also told she had hypertension. That turned out to be a surprisingly good thing. “My mother turned me on to the DASH Diet,” Punales explains.
DASH—which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension—is a scientifically vetted diet that lowers blood pressure in as little as two weeks (check out the details at www.dashdiet.org). When researchers from Harvard, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Louisiana State universities tested the effects of this ultra-healthy, low-fat, low-salt diet on 800 people, the results were amazing. Most participants experienced a reduction in blood pressure of more than 8 points total in the first week; they also saw their cholesterol drop by 14 points.
Punales was sold. Six weeks later and 9 pounds lighter, Punales’ pressure had dropped to 104/70—better than normal. “I felt really good, and my anxiety went away,” she says. “I have more energy and feel better about myself because I know I’m doing the right thing for me.”
Getting a Natural Low
The DASH Diet isn’t the only nondrug method of lowering blood pressure, though it arguably produces the fastest and most dramatic results. According to a study published in April 2008, researchers at Harvard and Simmons College in Boston examined the diets of the 88,000 women in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study and found that the diet also reduced heart attack and stroke risk by 24 percent and 18 percent respectively. Though the nurses weren’t actually on the DASH program, the researchers found women whose diets approximated it. It was the first study to link lower disease rates to the DASH eating plan.
“Blood pressure and cholesterol are actually intermediate endpoints, not the actual disease,” explains researcher Theresa Fung, RD, ScD, associate professor of nutrition at Simmons. “Lowering these doesn’t always translate into less heart disease. But in this case, it does.”
The DASH Diet can even trump unhealthy family history and smoking, says Dr. Fung. “The only thing different between those who had lower disease risk and those who didn’t was their diet.”
There’s nothing mysterious about how the diet works: It’s rich in fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy foods and protein, and whole grains, which contribute antioxidants, calcium, potassium, magnesium, fiber, and other natural chemicals that protect the cardiovascular system. In subsequent DASH studies, simply lowering dietary sodium lowered blood pressure by 8 points. What’s more, eating all that healthy food crowds the bad stuff, like sweets and snacks, out of your diet. The result, as Punales learned, is often weight loss, which itself can lower blood pressure.
What you put—and don’t put—in your mouth isn’t the only natural way to reduce blood pressure, though. Here’s what the latest research recommends.
Meditate on It
In a 2008 analysis of more than 100 studies on stress reduction and blood pressure, researchers found that Transcendental Meditation (TM) lowered blood pressure by an average of 5 points systolic (the top number) and 2.8 points diastolic (the bottom number).
“That translates into a reduction of 15 percent in heart attack risk and about a 20 percent reduction in risk of stroke, and that’s significant,” says lead author James W. Anderson, MD, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Kentucky, who collaborated with researchers from the National Institutes of Health-funded Institute of Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa.
What the study findings reiterate, he says, is the significant role stress plays in raising blood pressure. Elevated blood pressure is a by-product of the fight-or-flight response, our body’s inbred preparation for reacting to or retreating from danger. “And stress can lead to other things that can affect blood pressure, like gaining weight,” he points out. All forms of meditation help you replace stressful input with stillness and peace, which calms your cardiovascular system. In TM, you use a mantra—usually a meaningless sound—to focus and quiet your mind.
Dr. Anderson believes any brand of meditation will help. He practices a Christian-based meditation called centering prayer. “TM wasn’t my cup of tea, but I think I get the same benefit,” he says.
See Your Chiropractor
A subtle adjustment of the C1 vertebra, called the atlas, reduced blood pressure by an average of 14 points systolic and 8 points diastolic in a placebo-controlled study of 50 people with mild hypertension.
“The atlas is the ‘gatekeeper’ to all the nerves that come and go to the brain,” explains Charles Woodfield, RPh, DC, a chiropractor involved in the study, which was conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago Hypertension Center and the Chiropractic Health Center in Chicago. “It’s close to the brain stem, which balances the autonomic nervous system,” which, among other things, controls blood pressure.
Half the group received a real adjustment; the other half received a sham procedure. Only the group that was treated experienced a drop in blood pressure, and subsequent X-rays showed that their atlas vertebrae had been aligned.
While these results are promising, your chiropractor may not be able to do the BP-lowering adjustment unless he is certified in National Upper Cervical Chiropractic techniques, which requires several extra years of training. You can find a qualified local DC through the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association website (www.nucca.org).
Listen to the Music
A new study from the University of Florence, Italy, found that people who took medication for mild hypertension experienced as much as a 3-point drop in their readings after one week of listening to 30 minutes of classical, Celtic, and Indian (raga) music every day while doing deep breathing exercises in which they took twice as long to exhale as to inhale. After a month of listening to a CD and doing the breathing exercises, their pressures dropped by almost 4.5 points.
Researcher Pietro A. Modesti, MD, PhD, says he thinks the combination of slow, rhythmic music and deep breathing produced the result. Previous studies that compared the effects of fast and slow music on blood pressure found that tempo matters, so don’t throw away your meds, but do consider erasing those Iron Maiden, 50 Cent, or Vivaldi tracks from your iPod and replacing them with slower stuff.
Deputy Editor Denise Foley dropped her blood pressure by 14 points using mindfulness meditation.
Related Articles
Listen to Your gut
Posted by Jennifer NelsonPrescription For A Longer Life
Posted by Marianne McGinnisWhat Do You Do When the Snow Melts?
Posted by Jay GablerWhere Are the Best Places to See Spring Flowers?
Posted by Jay Gabler
» Advertisement «