It works: A healthy diet and lifestyle changes can improve your blood pressure

There are natural ways to deal with hypertension that don’t require using pharmaceutical drugs. Eating nutritious foods and making healthy life choices can help bring blood pressure to normal levels by taking advantage of the natural healing mechanisms in the human body.

Hypertension is mainly caused by two diet-related factors. The first is eating a diet high in animal proteins, cholesterol, and fat. This can lead to a medical condition called atherosclerosis, where fats, cholesterol, and other substances (plaque) build up on the artery walls and restrict blood flow.

The other factor is unhealthy levels of salt. Eating plenty of salty foods increases the amounts of fluid in the circulatory system and increases blood pressure.

Both of these conditions can also be reversed. Patients can avoid fatty and salty foods made from animal products like meat. Instead, they can switch to whole foods that are derived from plants and contain fewer unhealthy substances. (Related: Exercise is just as, and sometimes even more, effective than drugs for treating high blood pressure.)

Picking healthier diet and lifestyle choices will quickly improve blood pressure

Researchers at the St. Helena Hospital in California found that physical exercise and a vegetarian diet with low amounts of salt could bring down blood cholesterol and blood pressure levels very quickly. The considerable improvements in health can be experienced in as little as 11 days. Other healthy lifestyle choices include avoiding excessive consumption of alcohol – or even avoiding drinking it entirely – and increasing the number of foods with high natural fiber. Together, these steps can treat high blood pressure and even prevent its return.

Water fasting is a safe and effective way of eliminating hypertension

Indeed, a healthy diet and an active lifestyle are beneficial in the long run, but there are times where hypertension has to be reduced in as little time as possible. High blood pressure harms the arterial walls of the circulatory system and increases the risk of atherosclerosis, leading to a vicious cycle. The longer blood pressure stays high; the more damage will be done to the blood vessels, making the condition even more difficult to get rid of.

Fortunately, there are adaptive and natural means of treating hypertension. Supervised water fasting is capable of bringing high blood pressure down to healthier levels in a shorter amount of time than other existing treatments.

A 2001 experiment by a Center for Conservative Therapy research team provided details on the effectiveness of the monitored fasting technique. They placed 174 patients with mild to severe hypertension on a medically supervised water fasting regime.

The treatment consisted of a water-only fasting period that lasted for less than 11 days and a subsequent seven-day-long period of supervised re-feeding with whole foods from natural sources. During treatment, the participants rested completely.

The results of their study showed that patients who consumed only pure water in a supervised environment experienced swift normalization of blood pressure. Furthermore, the effects of water fasting increased with the severity of hypertension. In fact, participants on high blood pressure medications needed to stop taking them during water fasting because their blood pressure went down so quickly; at the end of the trial, all of the participants were free from hypertension and no longer needed pharmaceutical drugs.

Sources include:

FoodRevolution.org

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

HealthPromoting.com ^[PDF]