
I want to share with you a juice I made up for a relative suffering from high blood pressure. All the vegetables and fruits in this juice contain nutriments such as potassium, flavonoids and inorganic nitrate that help regulate and lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol or strengthen your blood vessels. To drink it an hour before lunch will also help you control better your appetite if you need to loose weight.
CAUTION !! : do not drink or eat grapefruit if you are under medication including blood pressure medication such as statins. The effect of the grapefruit combined with some medication is potentially lethal !!
If after a test, the doctor tells you your blood pressure is too high, he will probably tell you to start taking statins, a medication that’s prescribed to lower bad cholesterol. Now there are a few reasons why you should try to solve the problem without the statin.
- Once you start with statins, it is very dangerous to stop so you’ll probably have to take it for the rest of your life.
- Statins have a lot of disagreeable side effects. I’m not going to give you the list, just check on google or ask your doctor.
- We see it now with the Covid-19, people under statin medication seem to be most vulnerable to this virus.
- The efficiency of this medication in preventing strokes and heart attacks is only up to about 40%.
Now, not to do anything about your high blood pressure is also a big risk. My advice, and it’s the formula my relative is taking, is try to solve the problem the natural way! Talk about it with your doctor first but most of the time he will let you try it without the medication.
Here are a few things you can do:
- Change your eating habits. Try to eat less carbs and more fibers. Fill your menu with veggies, fruits, fish, meat and unsaturated fat. A Mediterranean diet is a good guideline for that.
- Potassium is a nutriment that regulates high blood pressure and the heartbeats. You can find it in a lot of food such as lentils, chocolate, avocados, pistachios, (sweet) potatoes, certain type of seaweeds, tomatoes, bananas and even chips, french fries and dried tomatoes! The problem is these last 3 contain a lot of sodium which increases blood pressure so better avoid them anyway. But studies show that if your intake of potassium is over 3.5 mg per day, the risks of cardiovascular problems decrease. Now you don’t need to calculate but just try to eat more food that contains potassium and it may help.
- Exercise ! Maybe the harder of these advices but also the best for your global health. This is really the best thing you can do. No intensive, painful sportive activities but regular exercice of medium intensity. Like walking 10 km per day, swimming or riding a bike.
- Lose that extra weight. Now this one is also not very fun BUT it is the most efficient way to solve your high blood pressure problem. A few kilos less and the blood pressure monitor will smile 🙂
Whatever you do, make sure your doctor is ok with that. By sharing all this information, my goal is to give you a few alternatives to medication to talk about with a specialist, not to put your health in danger 😉