Science Proves You Can Breathe Your Way to Lower Blood Pressure - People Ask - Why is This Secret?

There is no one natural hypertension remedy that is a "magic bullet. If you're looking for one, don't hold your breath - literally. In addition to the old staples for lowering blood pressure, there is one remedy discovered in 1994 that few hypertension sufferers know about. You can breathe your way to lower blood pressure. It's probably not the sole solution, but modern medical science has proven it can help.

There is even a device that will help you to regulate your breathing to lower blood pressure that has been proven to do so in multiple clinical trials and has won the approval of the FDA in 2002. If you've suffered with high blood pressure over the last seven years, I'll bet nobody has mentioned this effective little natural-cure machine to you. Am I right?

Dr. David Anderson (In a study conducted by the National Institute on Aging) noted the connection between slower, deep breathing and lower blood pressure. He thinks it's a common-sense connection you can use to your benefit. If he's right, the work could shed new light on the intersection between hypertension, stress and diet.

For example, under chronic stress, people tend to take shallow breaths and unconsciously hold them, what Anderson calls inhibitory breathing. Together with high stress, inhibitory breathing constricts blood vessels by increasing muscle tension and may also unbalance blood chemistry. Holding a breath diverts more blood to the brain to increase alertness - good if the boss is yelling or if you're under a physical attack- but it changes the blood's chemical balance. More acidic blood in turn makes the kidneys less efficient at pumping out sodium. (Americans eat nearly double the upper limit of salt for good health.) When you suspends breathing, plasma levels of carbon dioxide increase, the blood flow is preferentially shunted away from the skeletal muscles to the brain and heart, and blood pressure increases while heart rate decreases.

"If you sit there under-breathing all day and you have a high salt intake, your kidneys may be less effective at getting rid of that salt than if you're out hiking in the woods," said Anderson, who heads research into behavior and hypertension at the NIH's National Institute on Aging. In animals, Anderson's experiments have shown that inhibitory breathing delays salt excretion enough to raise blood pressure. Now he's testing if better breathing helps people reverse that effect.

Meditation, yoga and similar relaxation techniques that incorporate slow, deep breathing have long been thought to aid blood pressure, although research to prove an effect has been spotty. Why slow-breathing works "is still a bit of a black box," says Dr. William J. Elliott of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, who headed some of that research and was surprised at the effect.

Slow, deep breathing does relax and dilate blood vessels temporarily, but that's not enough to explain a lasting drop in blood pressure, says NIH's Anderson. So, in a laboratory at Baltimore's Harbor Hospital, Anderson is using a machine approved in 2002 by the FDA to test his own theory. In clinical trials, people who used the slow-breathing device for 15 minutes a day for two months saw their blood pressure drop 10 to 15 points. It's not supposed to be a substitute for diet, exercise or medication, but an addition to standard treatment.
Meanwhile, medical experts almost universally recommend you take simple steps to lower blood pressure: by dropping some weight, taking a walk or getting physical activity, and eating less sodium - no more than 2,300 milligrams a day - and more fruits and vegetables. Oh, and don't forget to stop and take a slow, deep breath now and them. 

Slow, deep breathing for a few minutes each day can help your overall health. For the average patient, you can measure your breathing rate manually.  You can also find the device used in this research and the clinical trials on the open market available to anyone. RESPeRATE is the only non-drug therapy that has been clinically proven over and over again to lower blood pressure. You can find a complete list of peer-reviewed articles on this site.

Find out more about RESPeRATE Here

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High Blood Pressure Causes (You Knew a Lot of Traffic Was Bad For You, Right?)

One of my themes here will always be that high blood pressure causes are directly relevant to our distance from the natural world for which we were created. Could there be anything farther from our natural origins than a traffic jam or regular, loud traffic noise?

Sitting in traffic can get your blood boiling temporarily but living near it might raise your risk of high blood pressure long-term, according to a Swedish study.

Researchers from Lund University Hospital found that among 24,238 Swedish adults aged between 18 and 80, those living near noisier roads were more likely to report having high blood pressure than those living in more peaceful surroundings.

"Road traffic is the most important source of community noise," said researcher Theo Bodin in a statement.

"We found that exposure above 60 decibels was associated with high blood pressure among the relatively young and middle-aged, an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke."

Middle-aged adults with the highest traffic-noise exposure - averaging more than 64 decibels which is just louder than an ordinary conversation - were almost twice as likely to report high blood pressure compared to other people.

The findings, published in the online journal Environmental Health, which involved calculating the average 24-hour traffic noise level in the area were people lived, add to evidence that chronic noise exposure may spell health trouble.

Other studies have found that people living near airports or working in noisy jobs have an increased risk of high blood pressure and heart attack.  The theory is that noise essentially signals to the body that it's in a stressful situation and so chronic exposure may cause long-term increases in stress hormone production, heart rate and blood pressure.

So, what's a modern day person to do?  First, be aware that constant noise may be a factor in high blood pressure.  If you have mild or moderate hypertension, consider quieter surroundings.  As an alternative, you might purchase those Bose(R) sound-reducing headphones.  For a cheaper noise reduction system, buy a set of gun muffs for your ears.  That's what I use when the wife wants to want TV in the bedroom and I want to sleep.

And, like I've told friends of mine who live in God-awful climates and complain, you can always move!

High Blood Pressure Natural Treatment - Sunlight!

In my first post, I talked about the roll of diet in our evolutionary history and how important natural food is to healthier blood pressure. Just as importantly, the human race evolved under the sun, and for thousands of years lived in concert with its heat and light. Yet over the last half-century or so we have lost this close contact with the sun and its healing powers.

The conventional wisdom is to avoid the sun and be sure to protect your skin with sunblock to prevent those terrible sun rays from touching your bare skin and entering your body. Keep this in mind - Humanity is also part of nature and needs sunlight for health and well being, for vitality and happiness.

Sunlight is vital to maintaining normal blood pressure. That's because vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, helps your body absorb calcium, which regulates blood pressure.

That's the premise scientists were investigating in a recent study of 18 people with high blood pressure. For six weeks, the study participants were exposed to either ultraviolet B light or ultraviolet A light all over their bodies for short periods of time.

The people exposed to ultraviolet B light had a significant reduction in blood pressure. The researchers think this reduction was caused by the connection between calcium and vitamin D.

Researchers also believe light directly affects blood pressure. Studies have shown that blood pressure tends to increase the farther you are from the equator and peaks in winter and lowers in summer.  It also tends to occur more often in dark-skinned people, who have more pigment in their skin to resist sunlight.  Since the production of vitamin D in your body depends on the amount of sunlight to which you are exposed, this could explain such differences in blood pressure.

A researcher at the University of Alabama hypothesizes that differences in exposure to sunlight and the resulting synthesis of vitamin D may at least partly account for these geographic, seasonal and racial blood pressure differences. Sunlight-induced synthesis of vitamin D decreases with increasing distance from the Equator, and h is lower in winter than in summer. People with deeply pigmented skin synthesize less vitamin D than light-skinned people do when exposed to the same amount of sunlight. Differences in vitamin D synthesis influence parathyroid hormone status, which in turn may alter blood pressure.

It's notable that geographic and racial differences in blood pressure and the prevalence of hypertension have usually been related to dietary changes, particularly sodium and potassium consumption, to intrinsic genetic differences in renal hemodynamics and sodium metabolism, and to the social and economic stresses of industrialization. The new hypothesis complements rather than replaces these explanations.

I'm not suggesting you slather baby oil on and broil in tropical sun at midday for hours.  Tanning
moderately throughout the year is better than avoiding the sun altogether; sudden bursts of strong solar radiation are unnatural and dangerous, protection needs to be built up slowly; early morning sunlight in cool temperatures is particularly beneficial to the body

In 2005, a clinical study of the health benefits of Far Infrared Sauna Therapy (a commercial product) was conducted by the University of Missouri, Kansas City.  The study concluded, "the far infrared sauna did lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure."  The study concluded that the blood pressure reduction was "statistically significant."  For more information, please visit www.sunlightsaunas.com.

You don't actually need a indoor sunlight sauna (unless, maybe, you live in Alaska, USA). If you want a natural prescription for lowering your high blood pressure, try a little dose of real sunshine. You don't want to overdo it and get a sunburn, but a 15-20 minute daily walk in the sunlight is good for two reasons. You'll be getting regular exercise, a good tonic for high blood pressure, and you'll be getting a dose of vitamin D

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Reasons for High Blood Pressure

Most health care professionals say they don't know the reasons for high blood pressure.  They are either kidding you (or themselves) or cannot even complete basic research.  Much of the reasons for high blood pressure has been known for over a hundred years (since the late 1800s)!

Dr. Max Bircher-Benner - a German doctor practicing in Europe in the late 19th century - was known for his ground-breaking work with raw food nutritional therapy.  (That's Dr. Max on the right.)  His physician son, Dr. Ralph Bircher, published additional studies in the 1960s about certain widespread modern eating habits that caused high blood pressure. The destructive results of these habits included:

• Thickening of the basal membranes of the blood vessels and capillaries,
• A narrowing of the inside diameter of the arteries and capillaries,
• Thickening of the blood (higher viscosity by more blood cells,
• Increasing of the coagulation tendency of the blood.

When these conditions occur, it's pretty simple to diagnose the problem.  Every engineer knows how to keep the pumped quantity of liquid/per minute at the same rate in a flow system with higher viscosity of liquid and narrowed pipes. The logical and natural solution is to elevate the pumping pressure!  Our body's intelligent control system elevates our blood pressure to maintain a sufficient oxygen and energy supply for the entire body.

According to these physicians and their research, high blood pressure is a natural response to un-natural eating.  The response of modern medicine is to force blood pressure down with un-natural, artificial (but very profitable) chemicals.

Dr. Bircher-Benner repeatedly observed - in the course of his practice - that a diet of wholesome, uncooked foods improved the health of many of his patients... even some who were on the verge of death. The Swiss physician attributed the restorative effects to the fact that raw plant foods are direct products of the sun. Dr. Ralph Bircher has since claimed that the success of his father's diet was due to the "great variety of enzymes" contained in the uncooked foods.  In fact, it's an oversupply of animal protein and refined carbohydrates and a deficiency of natural, man-appropriate food.

You may want to investigate the power of natural hypertension treatment.  Check out the facts about what you eat and how it makes you feel.  Remember, the reasons for high blood pressure are pretty well known.

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Note: If you're taking hypertension drugs now, do not stop without consulting your doctor. In the transition from drug therapy to natural cures, a health professional is a critical and important partner.