High Blood Pressure - 031

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the number of people in the world with high blood pressure has reached 1.13 billion, nearly doubling since 1975. And it's no longer a disease of just affluent countries. But the good news is high blood pressure can be reversed. Stay tuned to find out how. SPEAKER B Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical, health solutions for overall good healthy. SPEAKER A I'm hoping that all 1.13 billion people with high blood pressure are tuning in right now, because with me in the studio to share success stories of reversing high blood pressure is Dr. John Clark. Welcome, John. It's lovely to have you on the program. SPEAKER C Thanks for having me. SPEAKER A First of all, what is high blood pressure? I mean, what are the numbers? And secondly, why should we be concerned about it anyway? SPEAKER C Yeah, sometimes the numbers can be a bit daunting. You look at it and you wonder, what does that mean? They gave me a number. We usually give two numbers. One is the highest. Your heart pumps pressure into your bloodstream, and the other number is at the lowest point. And so we have a high number called systolic and a low number called diastolic. The high number, we say, shouldn't be over 120 and the low number shouldn't be over 80. And so those are the numbers we look at. You go over 120 over 80 and you're concerned. And why are you concerned? Because you don't feel any different. That's the dangerous part of high blood pressure. We say it's the silent killer because people could be walking around with 180 over 150 and be ready to have a heart attack, a stroke. Their kidneys could be failing. A number of things can go definitely wrong when the blood pressure goes too high and yet they don't know it and they could end up with tragic results. SPEAKER A Well, that's certainly something you can be concerned about, isn't it? Especially because it is, as you say, a silent killer. How does Australians actually compare with the rest of the world in terms of high blood pressure? SPEAKER C I was surprised. They are almost twice the numbers of the rest of the world. SPEAKER A Oh, that's awful. Yeah, didn't want to hear that. SPEAKER C Well, at least it gives us a goal to work on. Hey. So one in three Australians has high blood pressure. SPEAKER A That's not good news. What about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders? How do they fare? SPEAKER C Oh, they're even higher. They're about 20% more people with high blood pressure. It affects them, especially when they adopt the lifestyle of the rest of the Australian. SPEAKER A Oh, that's not something to be proud of, is it? What about men? How do they compare with women, say, for high blood pressure? SPEAKER C Well, men are ahead in that area, too. Sad to say. About 34% of men have high blood pressure, whereas only about 29% of women. SPEAKER A All right, well, that's all the bad news. Let's talk about some good news. And I know you have lots of solutions to all kinds of the problems that plague people on this planet, but if you had to choose just one, the single most powerful lifestyle, let's say, practice, that people could adopt to avoid or to reduce high blood pressure, what would that be? The single most important, what would that be? SPEAKER C I think that it would be water. How much water? SPEAKER A Water drinks. That just sounds a bit too simple. SPEAKER C It does, doesn't it? I call high blood pressure, in many respects, the great water shortage. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C Dehydration, as we call it. I remember I was giving a lecture on high blood pressure to an audience, and the lady on the front row, when I mentioned water practically jumped out of her seat. She says water. That's it. And I looked at her and says, really? Tell us more. She says, oh, my mother called me. Now, this lady was in her 60s, so her mother must have been in her 80s. My mother gave me a call. She says, Nancy. This lady's name was Nancy. Nancy, my blood pressure is 180 over 150. What do I do? Well, Nancy was pretty calm. Mother went on to say, Shall I call the ambulance? Shall I go to the hospital? Nancy says, well, Mom, I'll tell you what. Just sit down, drink three big glasses of water, and when I get there in 45 minutes, we'll check your blood pressure again. 45 minutes later, Nancy walked in, checked Mom's blood pressure, and it was 120 over 80. SPEAKER A Oh, true. Nancy knew something that you knew, obviously. Well, that's just amazing. Why does that work, though? How does that happen? If you have really low hydration, if you're dehydrated, your blood pressure can actually drop. So I'm just intrigued to know how drinking a lot more water will actually lower it. How does that work? SPEAKER C And it's true, if you don't have any water, your blood pressure will go out the body. SPEAKER A Yeah, I think it just stops, isn't it? SPEAKER C And so somewhere, though, before it goes totally to nothing, your body works very hard to get the blood pressure up, because its goal is to get the blood going to the top of your brain. And if the blood isn't going to the top of your brain very well, several things happen. One is all the blood vessels in your body tighten up to squeeze the blood up to the top of your brain, sort of like squeezing a toothpaste tube. The second thing that happens is your heart starts going faster, and so you get a fast heartbeat. Maybe you feel your heartbeat. Maybe you think you're having what we call palpitations or a heart that's signaling you that it's working hard. SPEAKER A So that's how it works. Well, that's intriguing. And that makes so much sense when you explain it like that. By the way, I don't squeeze the tube, I roll it. Just a little aside, are there any other natural remedies that you could suggest that would help with people having experiencing high blood pressure? SPEAKER C I had a friend whose mother always had high blood pressure. I mean, her whole life, she was on three high blood pressure medications all the time and still went to the emergency room frequently with out of control high blood pressure. And her son said, well, I've been studying some of this nice natural remedies, especially for high blood pressure, and studying drinking water. And he discovered that if you added some lemon to the water, that it was very helpful for high blood pressure. So he said, mom, every morning, start out with a liter of water with the juice of one fresh squeezed lemon in it and see if that doesn't work. Well, mom started doing that, and within six months, she was off all her blood pressure medications and she was drinking her lemon, but she got tired of lemon. I mean, it is pretty acid. And so she and he did some more research and found a good herb that was very similar, and that is Hawthorne berry. Hawthorne Berry has been very beneficial for a lot of people for high blood pressure. Some people take it as a tablet, others as a tea. I tend to prefer a tea. That way you get the liquid with it again. And she found that she could control her blood pressure on that natural remedy while continuing to drink plenty of water. SPEAKER A Very, very simple things that you could hardly imagine would be so effective. Just amazing. I mean, huge amounts of people see the doctor for blood pressure, I think. How many would that be like? I think I've heard you say something like, most people see the doctor for high blood pressure. Is that something like what you were saying the other day? SPEAKER C That's right. For a general practice physician, the number one disease he's going to be seen is high blood pressure. SPEAKER A Right. And to be able to control it in such a simple way, I mean, that isn't just preventing it, that's actually bringing it down over time. So that's fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. What about exercise? What sort of a role? How does that fit in with high blood pressure? SPEAKER C You know, if people don't exercise, they get stiff. Like, if we sit in these chairs too long and we don't get up, we're going to feel mighty stiff when we get out of this chair. Well, this happens to the whole body. The muscles get stiff, the blood vessels get stiff and stiff muscles resist blood flow. Stiff blood vessels resist blood flow. Therefore it takes more pressure to get the blood to go through those stiff muscles and stiff blood vessels. And so exercise helps to relax the blood vessels, make them more supple. It helps relax the muscles, make them more supple. It also makes it so that the heart is more efficient in each of its pumps so that the blood comes through in a more steady fashion. SPEAKER A Well, that's amazing. I mean, we keep hearing about exercise is good for just about anything that you name to do with the body. It's just amazing. But I would not have known that it was so good for high blood pressure. You tend to think, well, when you actually exercise, it sends your blood pressure up for that period. But what you're saying is that after that it's normalizing. It and there's nothing wrong with the blood pressure going up while we exercise. It's very normal. So that's fantastic. What about foods? Are there any foods that contribute in one way or another to high blood pressure? SPEAKER C You know, we are what we eat. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C I tell people, if you don't like what you are physically, medically, as far as diseases go, change what you eat. And it sort of makes sense, doesn't it? SPEAKER A It does, yeah. SPEAKER C And so there are certain foods that will send your blood pressure high. Now, salt is known to be one of those. There's a couple of reasons why salt causes high blood pressure. One is it hardens the arteries. It's sort of like not getting enough exercise. Those arteries become stiff, the blood doesn't go through them well, and you end up with high blood pressure. It also causes inflammation in those arteries and that can be sort of a problem with causing the heart to go faster. The other reason why we have trouble with high blood pressure, with salt is that salt makes you accumulate more fluid, it raises the volume of blood. So there's more blood coming in the heart, more blood going out of the heart. So higher preload, higher post load. This is another reason why salt is a problem. But then there's a certain group of people who are especially salt sensitive. It works on their nerves, it works on their body, and it raises their blood pressure. I had a friend who was working at a lifestyle center. He had a patient who had sinus problems. So they were washing his sinuses with salt water or saline solution. It gave the gentleman very high blood pressure, just that much salt, really. And so some people are very sensitive. So lowering the salt is a strategy used in lowering blood pressure. SPEAKER A Oh, that's fantastic. But imagine that he must have absorbed some of that salt into his system. SPEAKER C Yes, it went right into his bloodstream. SPEAKER A And didn't even drink it or eat it or anything like that. That's amazing. So any other strategies that you have that like what we've talked about, salt there anything else that would affect blood pressure or helpful or unhelpful? SPEAKER C Your salt is related to other seasonings, such as monosodium glutamate. Now, you'd be surprised how many foods have monosodium glutamate in them. They hide it under different names because nobody goes to supermarket looking for a product that has monosodium glutamate in it. But it's in there. It's in things that are highly seasoned, seasoned, especially salty foods. And that will raise your blood pressure pretty significantly. Otherwise, what are these names? SPEAKER A What are these secret names? SPEAKER C What do they hide it under? SPEAKER A Yeah, what are they? SPEAKER C Well, here in Australia, they give it a number, but it can be under natural flavors, it can be under seasonings, it can be under spices, it can be in such foods as soy sauce. It can be in any of these foods that are very salty, or any food that has been created through rotting, spoiling, fermenting, aging, such as vinegar, such as cheese. And so those things will raise your blood pressure pretty significantly too. SPEAKER A Yeah. Cheese is actually very high in salt as well, isn't it? SPEAKER C Very high in salt. SPEAKER A So you've got two things going on. SPEAKER C There and also aluminum. SPEAKER A Oh, is that right? SPEAKER C So that's a very daunting thing. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER C Now, other foods that will raise your blood pressure are anything that we call vasoactive foods, foods that have chemicals or properties to them that tighten your blood vessels up. Caffeine would be the number one. Any foods with caffeine or its related other chemicals, theobromine, or even nicotine will raise your blood pressure. SPEAKER A Oh, well, that's quite a list. Quite a list of things that we can take into account. Thank you for that. So does that cover all the foods we're going to talk about? SPEAKER C Well, we should also talk about good foods. SPEAKER A That's a good idea. SPEAKER C Eliminate everything. And of course your blood pressure would go down then. But certain foods are especially known to be helpful for blood pressure. One of those is celery. SPEAKER A Celery? SPEAKER C Celery, either as juice or eaten, lowers blood pressure. But any fresh fruit and vegetables are going to help you with your blood pressure, as opposed to tinned or processed foods. Most tinned or processed foods have added salt, have added preservatives, have added other things that can affect your blood pressure. Whereas if you're eating fresh fruits and vegetables and I usually recommend people get about half their diet as fresh fruits and vegetables, and it's very good for other things as well besides high blood pressure. SPEAKER A Yeah. Well, that's great. What about the timing of meals? I know you have something to say about that. How does that play into high blood pressure? SPEAKER C My grandfather used to say he only ate one meal a day. He just ate all day long. SPEAKER A All right. SPEAKER C And when you're doing that, you're always putting a little bit of food in your bloodstream. Food in your bloodstream will cause the blood to be thicker, it'll cause it to be harder to be pumped. Whereas if you have your meals at a regular time, it makes it so your body gets ready for the meal, it processes it quickly, and then when it's done, you don't have stuff in your bloodstream all the time. Now, another factor is whether or not you eat three meals a day. Interestingly enough, the third meal is associated with more high blood pressure. So I had a gentleman who I had given him the lecture on high blood pressure DVD that we produced, and he watched that and he said that he quit eating his third meal and as long as he didn't do that, his blood pressure went to normal. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER C So it was very helpful not to be eating in the evening. If you eat it in the evening, your digestion is slower, more the food is in the bloodstream, it stays there overnight, your blood pressure goes up overnight. SPEAKER A You make that sound a really good explanation of how that works. And I always think it's helpful to know why certain things have the effect that they do. So that's very interesting. Now, a lot of people in Australia actually do skip a meal a day, but it's not usually, if ever, the third meal, it's usually the first meal, which of course, is the most important one, breakfast. And I think when people start missing that third meal, it's easier to eat a really good breakfast and make that the main meal. But it'd be a bit difficult if you haven't had breakfast and you've had a light lunch to actually do what you're saying. But it's something worth working on, isn't it? SPEAKER C A lot of people wake up in the morning and they say, I'm not hungry for breakfast. And I say, that's because you ate your breakfast the night before. Your stomach is full, you're full of energy, and then you can't sleep well at night and you wake up groggy, and then you don't feel like eating breakfast. People who eat breakfast have less other diseases, less diabetes, less heart disease, less cancer. People who eat a big meal at night have faster growing cancer. SPEAKER A Is that right? Wow. Lots and lots of reasons to do all of the good things that you have found to be helpful for not just one problem, but many. What else can you tell us about taking care of high blood pressure? SPEAKER C You know, when you have high blood pressure and you don't realize it, sometimes it's good to monitor it. And you can get little kits at the chemist usually, and check your blood pressure. A lot of people have the trouble that when they go into the doctor, they see his white coat, their blood pressure goes up. SPEAKER A Yes, I've heard about that. SPEAKER C And we call it white coat syndrome. Yes, but it also has to do with people's stress. And so we discover that when people are under more stress, then their blood vessels tighten up, their heart goes faster, and their blood pressure goes up. And so stress management is a big part of blood pressure control. SPEAKER A Yes, it would be. SPEAKER C And some people will even get an electronic biofeedback machine to see where their stress is, and it helps their blood pressure. SPEAKER A Okay, so that's another good strategy. You're full of good ideas. What else can you tell us? SPEAKER C Well, I know when I've dealt with people with high blood pressure, that when they understand the physiology as to why they have high blood pressure, it helps. So three reasons. One, the blood vessels tighten up. This can be through stress, can be through things they ate, like caffeine, or it can even be through just always being low on water. The second thing is the heart going faster. Hearts go faster if you're out of shape. People who are fit, they've been exercising, have a slower heartbeat and a more efficient heartbeat and have lower blood pressures. The other thing that makes the heart go faster is if you're having a lot of MSG, it actually tends to mess with the heart rhythm and give you an arrhythmia or a fast heartbeat. Other things that will affect the heart when it's going fast such you have high blood pressure is if you end up always being late to appointments. SPEAKER A Yes, I think we've all done that once or twice. SPEAKER C I want to mention a little bit about the effect of medications on your high blood pressure. They did a study on a bunch of people who were getting high blood pressure. They wanted to see what its effect had on their brains. They started scanning their brains periodically, and they discovered that people that were getting high blood pressure were accumulating white matter lesions in their brains, lesions that would lead to Alzheimer's at a rate ten times faster than the normal population. Ten times, ten times faster. This was a serious problem. SPEAKER A That's a very scary number. SPEAKER C So they said, we better hurry up and give these people high blood pressure medications. So they put them on Diuretics, commonly called water pills. All these different interesting pills. SPEAKER A They should have talked to you. SPEAKER C And the result was the blood pressure did come down. But when they continued to scan their brains, the blood pressure medications did absolutely nothing to slow the rate at which the white matter lesions were accumulating in the brain. In fact, for Diuretics, it made them accumulate faster. So in order to stop the high blood pressure and the accumulation of the pre Alzheimer's lesions in the brain, you would need to change the lifestyle factors that were creating both. And so drinking more water, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, staying away from salt and MSG and caffeine and these kind of things. Another thing, dietarily that'll create high blood pressure is too much oil, too many fats. It thickens the blood, makes it harder to pump, makes the blood, so it carries less oxygen. So it has to be pumped faster and harder to get the same effect. SPEAKER A Just say that one again. That's interesting, what you just said about oils. Yes. And not as much oxygen in the blood. So the heart works harder to get that amount of oxygen through. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER A I love the way you explain these things, because if you just said, don't do this, do that and don't do that, it'd be like, well, you haven't convinced me. But now we understand how this works. It's more compelling. SPEAKER C Yes. The oil tends to coat the red blood cells, making it harder for them to get oxygenated. It's also true the oil itself in digestion takes more oxygen to become metabolized to get digested, and so it burns more oxygen. It slows the oxygen getting into the cells. And so people on a high oil diet have a lower oxygen on their brains. They don't think as well. And the effect lasts for about three days after a high fat meal. So it's a slow process, three days of stuff. Three days? SPEAKER A Three days. One high fat meal. Three days. SPEAKER C Three days. That is correct. SPEAKER A And that's quite likely going to be. SPEAKER C An evening meal, quite often an evening meal, things that are frozen. SPEAKER A So you've got a lot of stuff going on by eating at night already. And if it was a high fat meal, that would be even worse for the problem. SPEAKER C That's right, that's correct. Another thing that will raise your blood pressure is drinking sodas or soft drinks. Soft drinks have a lot of sugar. The sugar often gets metabolized into uric acid, the component of gout. When the uric acid goes up, the blood pressure goes up. On the other hand, feeding people pills or tablets that take away uric acid will lower blood pressure. So anything that will give a person gout will give another person high blood pressure. SPEAKER A Is that right? Well, it's fantastic the way so many of these natural things that the good Lord gave us fresh air and exercise and good food and so on, we've interfered a lot with the food supply, haven't we? And I'm not just talking about genetic engineering, I'm talking about the numbers of products on the shelf. I don't know the numbers, but it's many times, many times as many as there used to be going back a few decades. And they're not new plants or anything like that. They're manufactured things that have got a lot of those items in that you were mentioning, the flavors, the salts, the sugars, and all of those other little numbers that we need to be a bit careful of. So we really have really have changed a lot in what we eat from going back a while, haven't we? And paying dearly, because most of these illnesses that we're discussing, we're talking about high blood pressure today, but most of these illnesses are getting worse. I haven't actually heard of one that's getting better, right? Have you? SPEAKER C No, that's right. SPEAKER A So that should tell us something, that the increase is related to what we made of what we eat. SPEAKER C Modern life in this world has gotten more stressful. It's interesting. One statistic is that if somebody moves from the bush or the country into a big city, their blood pressure will go up by 20 points. On the other hand, getting away from the city and getting out in the country and walking where there's nature, there's birds, there's trees, your blood pressure will go down. For somebody who has high blood pressure needs to bring it down. Walking out in nature is one of those good things. SPEAKER A Yes. I think we'll probably have an influx of people moving to where we are. Wouldn't that be yes, but I've lived in city environments, and this is currently living in Morissette, or just down the road from Morissette, and we just comment frequently. We go for a drive and say, I love being in the country because there's trees on either side of the road in a lot of places, not just dwellings and fresh air and no traffic jams. We don't have traffic jams. We've heard about them. We run the news most times where the freeways are getting clogged up, but it's beautiful. I would not want to live in even an urban area now. Suburban, rather. I wouldn't even want to do that anymore. It's just so nice. Have that natural environment. Beautiful. SPEAKER C Yes. And the stress is the big factor. I was interested to note a certain study that showed that what you believe affected your stress and affected your blood pressure. They studied older people and what they believed, and if their spouse passed away and they believed in a good afterlife, they had low blood pressure. But if they didn't believe in a good afterlife, they had high blood pressure. SPEAKER A Well, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? Yes, because our mind tells us lots of things, doesn't it? And it doesn't have to be necessarily a true thing. I'm not saying in that instance. But yes, what we believe about an event, an activating event, is really what triggers the response. That's lots and lots of different aspects that you've told us about. Maybe you should just review some of those and just go over them again, because you've told us a lot of very interesting things. SPEAKER C Well, I'm going to make the list. Start with water. SPEAKER A Oh, I'm not surprised about that. And I actually did remember that was number one. SPEAKER C And so water is very important, keeping the blood come to the top of your head, making sure that your blood vessels are full of blood so that your heart can efficiently pump it and your body isn't struggling to get the blood to the top of your head. Second thing is good fresh fruits and vegetables, which are low in salt, high in fiber, lot of plenty of good nutrients. We want to eat food that will sustain life and avoid salt and then exercise, exercise that keeps your blood vessels supple, keeps the heart in good condition, keeps the muscles from resisting blood flow because they are also supple and last of all, I mentioned that meal timing is good no evening meal. SPEAKER A Yes you did, you mentioned that and look, thank you so much. It's been a very very informative session viewers. If you would like to watch our programs on demand you just go to our website that's 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the watch button. We hope to see you next time for more life saving information. God bless. SPEAKER B You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television