Lower Blood Pressure Naturally

Are you one of the “worried well”? Do you need to get rid of that spare tire and lower your blood pressure?

The "Worried Well": Many people suffer anxiety over blood pressure levels that were once considered normal.

Of course, most people would love to be lean and fit. But which is worse for your health: carrying a few extra pounds or the worrying over high blood pressure and heart disease it provokes?

Many medical experts are beginning to see that the stress and anxiety many people are subjected to far outweigh the relatively low risk factors of being slightly to moderately overweight or borderline hypertensive. And to a large degree it’s doctors, the helping profession, along with the pharmaceutical industry, who are pushing the fear.

Now I’m not at all anti-medicine nor anti-drug. Even as a promoter of natural health methods I fully realize that not every health problem can be solved naturally. Stronger stuff is often called for. But in my own special interest of blood pressure control I’ve seen several medical developments that don’t just concern me; they worry and even scare me.

The first of these concerns has to do with the way increasing numbers of people are demonized with constant new “findings” about the health risks of certain conditions. The most obvious of these is obesity. Of course, any condition in the extreme can have health consequences. But the fact is that being extremely underweight is even more risky to your health than obesity… but which gets all the attention?

And it’s not just the exaggerated findings that pose a problem. The other side of the issue is the way increasing numbers of people are being squeezed into the definition of obesity. Men with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or above are now labeled overweight. BMI is said to be a better measure of obesity than earlier methods but it still leaves a lot to be desired. According to their BMI, many professional athletes we so admire are overweight or even obese.

According to BMI, many of these athletes are "obese", with all the corresponding health risks like high blood pressure

Then there was the endless publicity about the dangers of belly fat. A concentration of fat around the midsection (that notorious “spare tire”) was said to increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke. But recently, the largest study in the field exposed the entire theory as nothing but a myth. Belly fat is, in fact, no better nor worse than any other type of fat.

Yet these important findings – findings that would relieve a lot of people - received almost no publicity, probably because it’s good news and good news just doesn’t sell! Search the Internet even today and you get back nothing but page after page on the (now disproved) dangers of belly fat.

So by changing standards of measure and constantly narrowing the scope of obesity to merely a few pounds of excess weight, medical authories have trapped millions of new people in the net of “high risk”. The damage done by the resulting stress and worry over these conditions (not to mention the countless unnecessary prescriptions for statins and drugs to reduce blood pressure) is incalculable.

In a similar but even more dramatic development, millions more “worried well” have been caught up in the hypertension trap. This was a relatively easy manoeuvre, achieved by simply moving the goal posts for “normal” blood pressure.

Over the course of many decades normal blood pressure was defined at up to 140 systolic over 90 diastolic. In most of the world these standards still apply. But in the United States doctors decided a few years ago to set the upper pressure limit at 130 over 80. In doing so they created tens of millions of new hypertension patients virtually overnight, most of them middle-aged or older as blood pressure naturally tends to rise somewhat as we age.

Some agressive doctors immediately prescribe medication to lower blood pressure at the new, lower threshold. Others have created a new syndrome by calling the region from 130/80 to 140/90 “prehypertension” and guess what? The drugs industry have created new medications specifically for the new condition of prehypertension!

There may indeed be genuine medical reasons for concern over prehypertension. But again, few if any would consider the condition high risk and in no case does it merit medications or undue fear and anxiety. It’s simply one more health “risk” to add to the burden of the worried well.