What is hypertension?
Before we can come up with a nutritional strategy to normalize blood pressure, it helps to understand what blood pressure is and how it’s measured.
The heart’s main job is to pump blood through the body; the blood carries vital oxygen and nutrients to your organs, and carbon dioxide to your lungs, so you can expel it through breathing. There are four valves located inside the heart that function as traffic controllers, they channel that blood in the right directions in and out of a network of tubes called blood vessels, such as veins and arteries: veins carry blood in, arteries carry blood out. The heart is a muscle, and as such it has the ability to contract and relax, decrease and increase in size: it contracts to pump out blood, it relaxes to let blood in, beating (contracting/relaxing) at a rate controlled by the nervous system and some hormones.The pressure or force of the blood being pumped out is called systolic, whereas the pressure between beats, when the heart is relaxing and filling with blood, is called diastolic. Your heart also has its own electrical system, which acts as an on/off beating switch panel, timing the beats as needed (pulse rate).
This system is orchestrated by many internal factors: some hormones (chemical messengers), for instance, tell the heart how fast and hard to beat, and electrolytes (electrically conductive chemicals), need to be balanced so that the electric switches will behave . Since external factors play a major role in influencing the heart’s behavior, in order to adapt to stimuli from the outside, it is imperative that all internal players be properly balanced. We will delve into dietary electrolytes and hormone-balancing strategies in subsequent articles.
Hypertension, or higher than normal range blood pressure, is primarily caused by poor lifestyle and dietary choices. It can be defined as primary, meaning no specific cause can be pinpointed, and secondary, meaning it is caused by an undelying condition, namely a kidney disorder.
Hypertension is part of a cluster of symptoms that signal serious metabolic disorders, and it is a major risk factor in cardiovascular disease. Keeping track of blood pressure changes while working on dietary and lifestyle modifications is a crucial tool in that sudden spikes can have serious consequences and even be fatal. A GHD personal blood pressure monitor that is directly linked to your physician’s phone and computer is the single best ally you can possibly have while working on eliminating the causes of hypertension. Ideally you should take your blood pressure once a day or every two days, and your readings as an adult should be less than 120 (systolic) and less than 80 (diastolic). Below is a chart from the AHA showing blood pressure ranges, from normal to hypertension crisis.