By If there is some natural way in which you could alter your blood pressure, would you go ahead and give it a shot?
My mum had bouts of high blood pressure during the later stages of her life.
Now that she’s passed away, I am confident it had much to do with her hidden pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer is sometimes hard to spot because it’s so tiny and tends to magnify other health challenges, such as high blood pressure.
Mum’s blood pressure was misdiagnosed as being the result of her diabetes.
But, slowly, the constant elevation of her blood pressure wore her kidneys out.
They were already pretty bad.
Mum’s whole family had kidney problems.
She could not go through chemo, which would have given her a few more years.
Mum’s kidneys and liver would have been too weak for those toxins. So her death was a slow and deliberate one.
That was very hard on her and broke my heart.
Although this post isn’t about cancer, high blood pressure can also lead to many health issues down the track and weaken your kidney function.
One aspect of keeping your blood pressure under control is diet, but you will benefit from another dietary plan to help create lasting change.
Nearly half of adults in the United States have hypertension, raising the risk of heart disease and stroke. These are the leading causes of death in the U.S.
Dr David J. Durgan and his colleagues have been on a mission to understand hypertension, notably how gut microbiota can cause adverse effects on blood pressure.
Various animal experiments have proven that injecting gut microbiota from a hypersensitive animal into one of healthy blood pressure results in the development of high blood pressure!
The question is, if you can cause an animal to experience high blood pressure via the gut microbiota, the opposite will occur.
To uncover the answer, Dugan and his colleagues viewed previous research showing that fasting was one of the main drivers of gut microbiota composition and a promoter of cardiovascular benefits!
Unfortunately, these studies did not correlate with gut microbiota and blood pressure.
Throughout some experiments with rats, fasting and gut microbiota alterations, Dugan concluded the following findings:
- Rats that fasted decreased their blood pressure as opposed to rats that did not fast
- Alterations in the microbiota induced by fasting were sufficient to mediate the blood pressure-lowering effect of intermittent fasting.
We can conclude that intermittent fasting can be beneficial in terms of reducing hypertension by reshaping the composition of gut microbiota in an animal model.
We know that fasting itself helps to regenerate cells in our bodies.
That would suggest it can help regulate gut microbial populations’ activity that provides health benefits — low blood pressure.
But the question remains: What does the gut do with blood pressure?
It has not been possible to determine this factor, and it’s also unclear why gut bacteria drives these changes.
These two may not seem like obvious connections, but it’s also not surprising when you look at this deeply.
Diet is one of the main contributing factors that increase blood pressure — alcohol, processed foods, salt, etc.
Those foods enter our bodies and are then left to pass through the digestive system.
In addition, particular nutrients will have certain chemicals that produce bacteria and enter the blood supply.
Our gut also hosts several processes that have a considerable part in hypertension, including metabolism and hormones and their connection with the nervous system.
For far too long, we have determined our bodies as separate components — but the body works as a whole with what we give it daily.
That includes food, relaxation, hydration, stress and the list.
Studies have shown that hypertension is associated with increased sympathetic nerve activity and gut permeability.
When that happens to our guts, the environment becomes altered.
This makes it easier for bacteria products to start passing into the blood.
Smoking & stress also play a part in changing this exemplary system.
So, as you can see, there is a reason behind the madness of these researchers conducting several studies on animals to prove that hypertension can manifest in a gut with particular bacteria -and that fasting plays a part in lowering blood pressure.
What can you do in the meantime?
The most important thing you or anyone can do is change your diet!
Eat lots of whole foods, vegetables, fruits and lots of water.
Before you start fasting, see your doctor about any health implications you might have.
Determine if you have underlying health conditions before you embark on your journey.
But in saying that, you have many benefits if you change your diet first and foremost. So that will be your single, most major game-changer.
If we could do that one thing, we could all lead a more prolonged and disease-free life abandoning the many health issues that plague our world today.
I’d love to hear from anyone who lowered their blood pressure through the change of diet and fasting. Please feel free to share your experience.
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