Are natural blood pressure remedies like supplements and superfoods really effective?
Search the Internet for natural blood pressure treatments and I dare you not to get overwhelmed or confused!
The cornucopia of so-called superfoods claiming to reduce blood pressure include garlic, beetroot, chocolate, celery root, bananas, apple cider vinegar and many many more. What a menu!
And these are just the food group… Supplements follow close behind: magnesium, potassium, omega-3, Q-10 and Hawthorne berry to name just a few.
And let’s not forget drugs… not quite natural but definitely remedies!
These are all what I call “outside-in” remedies and the problem with all of them is their unpredictability. You take something with the hope that they will act on you in a certain way internally. Yet reality often does not correspond with theory.
Lowering blood pressure with “outside-in” remedies is about as effective as taking shots in the dark!
Are any of these remedies really very effective? Rarely. Most of the remedies that make the rounds of the Internet do so under the influence of the placebo effect. Somebody gets lucky with great results from something and it spreads like wildfire. Remedies like apple cider vinegar and celery root are still circulating in this way.
But talk to the same person a couple months later and it’s likely they’ve already given up on this particular remedy and moved on to another. But no matter… like the proverbial bus, there’s always another natural remedy coming along any minute.
By the way, the placebo effect is also why product testimonials are often acquired from new customers. (By the time it wears off they’re usually too embarrassed to demand withdrawal of their testimony!)
What about hypertension medication?
As I already mentioned, blood pressure drugs are remedies for the purpose of this discussion. But in contrast, drugs are widely held to be extremely effective; it’s just their side effects that you have to watch out for.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Any doctor will tell you that treating high blood pressure with drugs is often a long and frustrating process of trial and error. And any hypertension patient will confirm that finding the right drug and dosage for their condition is a painful ordeal.
What’s more, blood pressure drugs are so ineffective that many cases require multiple prescriptions to control. In a landmark study by the Office of Veterans’ Affairs, still used as a basic reference today, the most effective blood pressure medication, diltiazem, had a response rate of only 63%.
Another common problem with drug treatment for hypertesion is, of course, side effects. Sometimes the only option left is to prescribe additional drugs to counteract the side effects of the primary medications!
Sadly, some people will always require medication to control their blood pressure but you can see plenty of reason that these should clearly be a last resort rather than the routine treatment that they are.
Lifestyle modification is surely the answer to high blood pressure… isn’t it?
If you were to believe the media you might think that a healthy lifestyle is the answer to high blood pressure… to all disease and unwellness, in fact!
Many medical experts claim that up to 95% of hypertension cases could be resolved with lifestyle changes.
Of course lifestyle is important. But is it the be-all and end-all it’s made out to be?
Genetics, for example, is clearly a factor. High blood pressure tends to run in families and is more prevalent in some races than in others.
A healthy lifestyle has many benefits... but don't count on it to always drop your blood pressure
And what about the fit and healthy people who are routinely afflicted with blood pressure problems? Hypertension doesn’t discriminate by picking just the old, fat and infirm. And speaking of obesity, a recent study has exposed the myth of the link between being overweight and high blood pressure. Lots more study is needed but it seems that obesity is not the health risk we’ve been led to believe it is.
Read the full story about these surprising findings in my article: Struggling To Lose Weight For Lower Blood Pressure? Don’t Worry About it!
Finally, I can also tell you from my own experience and that of many other hypertension sufferers that improving your lifestyle is no guarantee of beating hypertension. It’s clear that by no means is all or even 95% of high blood pressure lifestyle-related.
Again, lifestyle is surely important. But lifestyle modification specifically as a blood pressure remedy is unpredictable.
The most effective approach to hypertension is control, not remedies!
The effects of “outside-in” remedies, whether drugs or dandelions, are unpredictable at best. Lifestyle modication can be difficult to nearly impossible depending on your condition and personal circumstances. It’s effects are also unpredictable.
The best approach to healthy blood pressure is through something we don’t often hear about - control – i.e. from the inside out! You have various mechanisms to do this at your disposal… without getting into mysterious realms of mind control and other more esoteric practices.
One of the most powerful natural regulators of blood pressure – and surely the easiest to learn – is your breathing. Breathing has a direct and nearly instant effect on our blood pressure. Just 15 minutes a day using a modern method of slow breathing developed by doctors is more than enough to make significant and lasting changes in your blood pressure.
More of that in the next post… see you there!
A unique method of blood pressure control: The BreatheEasy Sytem