Lower High Blood Pressure Naturally

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by Chris Shugart

Got Hypertension? Eat This Food

Having a stroke or heart attack really interferes with making gains. Consume two cups of this food to lower high blood pressure.

Lower High Blood Pressure… or Stroke Out in the Gym

How do you know if you’re having a stroke? Well, you’ll lose control of half of your face, get blurry vision, and experience a blinding headache. Oh, and your speech will come out garbled as you’re stumbling around trying to tell someone about it.

Surprisingly, that’s how many people learn they have hypertension: by stroking out or even having a heart attack. The signs of high blood pressure are pretty subtle before that, which is why your doctor (and even your dentist) will slap a blood pressure cuff on you as soon as you walk through the door.

Since one in three people will suffer from high blood pressure, and around 25% will have a stroke sometime in their lives, researchers are scrambling for pharmaceutical solutions. But the answer may be right there in the supermarket’s produce section.

The Blueberry Study

The-Smoothie-That-Could-Save-Your-Life

Researchers gathered up 40 people and told them to either consume 200 grams of wild blueberries per day (blended into a smoothie) or control drinks without blueberries for one month.

Here’s what happened: The subjects consuming blueberries reduced their blood pressure by 5mmHg, which is about what a prescription hypertension drug can do. Blood vessel function improved and cardiovascular disease risk factors decreased. The control group showed no improvements.

One researcher noted, “If the changes we saw in blood vessel function after eating blueberries every day could be sustained for a person’s whole life, it could reduce their risk of developing cardiovascular disease by up to 20%.”

Why blueberries? Because anthocyanins, that’s why. Those are the incredibly healthy plant flavonoids that give certain foods their blue, indigo, or red color.

How To Use This Info

You could eat 200 grams of wild blueberries per day. That’s almost two cups, which is probably why they were blended into smoothies for the study. Wild blueberries are smaller because they have less water content. Think of them as “concentrated” blueberries. That gives them, cup for cup, 33% more anthocyanins than regular blueberries.

You could also take a cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G) supplement. If you’re taking Indigo-3G (Buy at Amazon), our nutrient partitioning agent for body comp improvement, then you’re already getting a hefty dose of anthocyanins.

Another supplement option is Superfood (Buy at Amazon), a freeze-dried blend of 18 whole fruits, veggies, and berries, including:

  • Wild blueberries (1.5% anthocyanin)
  • Raspberries (0.7% anthocyanins)
  • Acai berries (1% anthocyanins)

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Personally, I eat at least a cup of wild blueberries per day and supplement with one serving of C3G and one serving of Superfood. I do this because blueberries are delicious, Indigo-3G allows me to eat more carbs without getting fat, and taking Superfood is easier than eating six pounds of fruits and veggies per day. But hey, I’ll take the health benefits too. Having a stroke would really ruin leg day.

Now, blueberry smoothies and anthocyanin supplements may not be able to tackle dangerously high blood pressure, so talk to your doctor. But including them in your diet and supplement plan is a wise choice regardless.

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Reference

Reference

  1. Rodriguez-Mateos A et al. Circulating anthocyanin metabolites mediate vascular benefits of blueberries: insights from randomized controlled trials, metabolomics, and nutrigenomics. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2019 Jun 18;74(7):967-976. PubMed.
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If you have high BP please seek medical help, and get a prescription for medicine that fixes your problem and prevents future damage to heart and kidneys. Please do NOT think that number one death cause can be in any way fixed with blueberries.

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Don’t you have a pile of steroids to go take, Hank? You know, all the ones that contribute to the number one cause of death?

From the article you didn’t read:

Now, blueberry smoothies and anthocyanin supplements may not be able to tackle dangerously high blood pressure, so talk to your doctor. But including them in your diet and supplement plan is a wise choice regardless.

Blood pressure medication side effects:

  • Erection problems
  • Feeling tired, weak, drowsy, or a lack of energy
  • Cough
  • Diarrhea or constipation
  • Dizziness or lightheadedness
  • Feeling nervous
  • Headache
  • Nausea or vomiting
  • Skin rash
  • Weight loss or gain without trying

I’ll just have blueberries and my supps, thanks.

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Let Big Pharma “fix” your problems. That’s going so well, isn’t it?

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Great stuff. Coincidentally, I started an experiment three nights ago. I’ve had a presciption for Losartan for a while. My systolic has stayed high, near 140, and my diastolic low, around 70. No changes despite medication and a lot of dizziness. I stopped the medication and for the last three days my blood pressure has been 120 over 70, and no dizziness. Not sure what that’s all about. But I have been adding wild blueberries to shakes for over year now. Maybe the medication was getting in the way of my health. Go figure.

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This study is useless. N=40 is not enough statistical power to draw any conclusions. The subjects were not controlled. You have no idea whether they ate the blueberries or not. You have no idea what else they did that could affect their blood pressure. By claiming the blueberries reduced blood pressure, you are admitting that different foods can affect blood pressure. How do you know the subjects with blood pressure decreases didn’t eat another food that affects blood pressure?

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I’ll trust the researchers did a good job here (read the full study; it was exhaustively well-monitored, four human studies plus an animal study). They were quite excited about the outcomes.

Also, I tried it when I first came across the study. Went from borderline to normal quite quickly.

More from the researchers:

“We also report for the first time in healthy adults that chronic blueberry consumption leads to a significant sustained improvement in endothelial function and lowering of 24-hour systolic BP. The potential clinical relevance of the findings is underscored by the fact that the lowering of BP in the magnitude observed in our study of 5 mmHg is similar to what is commonly observed in clinical studies with BP lowering medication (eg, ACE inhibitors) in patients. Taken together, our data demonstrate that blueberries not only acutely and transiently improve endothelial function but also induce sustained improvement in endothelial function and systolic BP after repetitive consumption for 1 month.”

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The article is free to read. I would recommend reading the section titled “power analysis” to address your statistical power concerns. Remember that statistical power is not determined by sample size alone, but also by expected effect size. Moreover, since this study had multiple data points from each individual (repeated measures), the sample size of N=40 carries a little more weight (so to speak). Additionally, there were four human studies done, one including a registered randomized control trial. I recommend reading the methods of that study to address your experimental/subject control concern. Lastly, to come to a more informed conclusion, look at the outcomes of all four human studies and the one animal study and synthesize the useful takeaways from a broader representation of the results. I by no means am endorsing this study or am knowledgeable of the literature, but I do want to point out that the researchers address your concerns in the full article. Your opinion of how well they address your concerns is of course up to you.

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Eating that amount of blueberries per day is economically difficult, innit? Especially since the pandemic plus the war in Ukraine, berries have more than doubled in price. Total bullshit. 200g per day is 6 kg per month, comes in at around 60 USD… that’s more than a fourth of my monthly food budget, and the caloric content is negligible! visible despair

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I buy generic, store-brand frozen blueberries. Fairly economical. Might be pricey with fresh though. But frozen is as good as fresh nutritionally. Better in some cases: https://t-nation.com/t/are-frozen-vegetables-healthy

Here’s the current price for frozen (Colorado Walmart). I didn’t check the price before Bidenflation, so I’m not sure if this is a big increase or not. This is for a 2 pound, 8 ounce bag.

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Even frozen blueberries have doubled in price near me.

I’m m not against taking powdered food supplements, but I haven’t seen much evidence that they offer benefits similar to their whole food counterparts. The argument that it saves money doesn’t make sense to me in that if you took that $50 and bought fresh produce it would certainly impact your health more favorably than a processed powder.

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Superfood isn’t a “processed powder” except for freeze drying, which keeps everything nutritionally intact minus the water. Superfood is “whole food” as counterintuitive as that may seem at first. (Might not get you as full of course.) If you can get 18 fresh and often exotic berries, fruits, and vegetables down every day, go for it. Seems expensive and tricky though.

I think I proposed the best solution at the end of the article: a combination approach. Eat berries when you can; take Superfood daily since it’s hard for some folks to get enough berries for a medicinal effect, or at least take it when that day’s diet is lacking in a wide variety veggies, fruit, and berries.

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Honestly, superfood tastes like crap, lol. I use Animal Pak Greens instead, all pills. I’ve found citrulline is great at lowering blood pressure, but the past year plus I have taken 20mg tadalafil each morning and my blood pressure is 120/70 even after a bunch of caffeine, It works great and my doc is fine with it.

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Honestly, worrying about the natural sugar content of blueberries is… well, it’s a bit much. But I understand you have something else you’re testing out right now, and perhaps another goal. Worth keeping in mind in the future, and you might want to look into Superfood which has 1g of sugar per serving.

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The best foods to lower blood pressure is beets or cayenne pepper

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Any idea how much you’d have to so consume? I’m curious because with some of the “food cures” the amounts needed to get a medicinal dose are off the charts. It’s either not economical or not even doable here in real life.

We should eat good foods like that of course, but sometimes it’s like trying to drink red wine to get an effective dose of resveratrol. Fun idea, but it would take about 140 bottles. Or you could take a few capsules of a supplement, which seems a bit easier, a lot cheaper, and with fewer side effects.

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You could eat a beet everyday, or drink a half cup of beet juice everyday…i am sure you all know this, beets is a natural nitric oxide

as far as cayenne, if you use hot sauce that has the ingredient you are already consuming it

i had high blood pressure and this helped me, because losartan was giving me side effects so i went natural…now, with exercising more consistently, walking everday, losing some weight and not getting stressed out…blood pressure is in normal ranges

many years ago, i read somewhere that if feel like you are having a heart attack, call 911 and then drink some hot sauce that has cayenne…its supposed to open up your arteries for better flow

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Glad it worked out for you. I looked into it briefly and found that some studies show drinking about 2 cups of beet juice daily helps with blood pressure. I’m sure your half-cup combined with weight loss and exercise helped a bit though.

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A cup of pineapple used to bring mine down to ridiculously (dangerously) low levels. Between the potassium and bromelain, it would really drop, like from 105-110/75 to 75/60.

Had to stop that though because the blood thinning effect combined with some other meds created a danger of hemmorhaging.

Not arguing against supps, just throwing it out there.

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Next time I get a physical, I’m definitely doing this before having my BP taken!

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