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Hi, it’s Dr Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center. I want to talk to you about a really common problem,
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which is high blood pressure. So blood pressure is measured with a cuff. There’s ranges that are
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normal, somewhat based on age but mostly blood pressure should be in a certain range. There’s
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tens of millions of people who have blood pressure that’s too high and they’re suggested by their
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doctors to go on medication to lower the blood pressure. Now high blood pressure is indeed a
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bad thing. If the blood pressure is too high that means the force going through your blood vessels
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is too high and this force can cause damage to those blood vessels or damage to the cells that
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are on the other side of those blood vessels or cause damage to the cells that are on the
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other side of those blood vessels. So there’s risk to brain, to stroke, to TIAs, there’s,
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there’s risk to kidneys, there’s risk to heart. So we don’t want high blood pressure and high blood
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pressure shouldn’t be ignored. What we want is we want elastic arteries that are very responsive.
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The usual solution to blood pressure is medication and there are medications that relax arteries,
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there are medications that make you pee extra salt out, there’s medications that block calcium from
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getting in and out of cells and sometimes these blood pressure medicines are needed,
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sometimes they’re effective but often times there is a solution where the person doesn’t have to
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keep taking those blood pressure medicines because they just don’t need them anymore.
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Now if we think of it, we’ve got a system where we’ve got a pump,
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and we’ve got blood vessels and we got fluid flowing through those blood vessels.
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In that fluid there are cells which are called red blood cells
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and red blood cells if you measure the diameter the distance across the red blood cell,
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it’s about seven microns, seven millionths of a meter. The capillary bed is four microns.
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So you got to take something that’s this big and it’s got to go through this big.
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Now if we look at the profile in the membrane, the outer skin of the cell of the red blood cell,
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it is supposed to have a balance in that outer skin of four parts omega-6 oils, these are the seed
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oils, the vegetable oils to one part omega-3 oils, which are the fish oils. The average American diet
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is 24 to 1. People are eating fried foods, seed foods, nuts you know vegetable processed vegetable
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oils and their intake is 24 to 1, not four to one. So what do you think these things get made out of?
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They get made out of seed oils at a high ratio and these seed oils make membrane stiff
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and so this membrane is like uh.
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Now if you’re back here with a pump, what do you got to do? You got to pump harder.
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That’s high blood pressure, that’s one cause of high blood pressure,
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you got to get that thing through. Now if the cells on the other side need to get that oxygen,
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if your treatment is give drugs that don’t let the heart pump hard,
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you will lower the blood pressure but you also will not deliver enough oxygen to these cells.
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Now these cells when they don’t get enough oxygen, what they do is they say, I need more
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oxygen and they send a message back up to the brain that then goes back to the heart and says
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you know pump, come on pump and you get this Catch-22, so half the time people would take
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blood pressure medicine, don’t take them because in order to get the dose enough to get the blood
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pressure low, now they can’t get an erection or they get dizzy when they stand up or they
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feel terrible, it’s like I’m not going to do that because most people don’t feel their high blood
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pressure, they don’t have headaches, you know they don’t have, they don’t have, they don’t notice it,
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okay. So that’s just one of the things. It may be that their blood’s too thick for other reasons,
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they don’t have enough vitamin E or the or, or they’re they’re dehydrated all the time.
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It may be that they have a a total body low level of magnesium and potassium.
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So now you have this capillary, right before the capillary there’s a little
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muscular it’s called an arteriole it’s a little muscular thing
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and guess what muscles do if they don’t have enough potassium and magnesium? They spasm. So
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you might have a normal flexible red blood cell but now this thing is spasmed, it’s too small.
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That could cause high blood pressure, okay. You might have deficiencies of other nutrients
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so that the cells are working correctly like vitamin D. Vitamin D is a natural
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anti-hypertensive. You know there’s an epidemic in people with dark skin because they don’t get any
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sunshine or enough sunshine and people with dark skin need way more sunshine to make vitamin D in
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their bodies than people with light skin. You know in Ireland the sun doesn’t come out hardly ever
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so it had to adapt so that a little bit of sun would produce a lot of vitamin D.
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If you’re living in Africa and you’re in the sun all the time or in the Middle East
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people naturally get darker skin and they get immune to sunshine producing vitamin D.
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Now if they live in Chicago and they don’t have any sunshine they don’t get vitamin D.
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And there’s actually published epidemics in people with darker skin who don’t take vitamin D
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who have high blood pressure and you give them vitamin D and their blood pressure goes down.
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So there’s all these reasons why it might be why you have high blood pressure and why we need to
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figure out what is the reason in you. Sometimes people have just too much lead in their kidneys
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or mercury or arsenic and so what we do in someone with high blood pressures okay let’s look at
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all these things and try to optimize them and in many cases the blood pressure goes down.
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It goes down because now the system is actually working the way it’s supposed to work
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and you have physiology that’s now reflecting health
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and the medications aren’t needed. So I’m not saying stop your blood pressure medicine, that’s
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dangerous. I’m not saying if you have high blood pressure you shouldn’t take it. But if you do and
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you don’t want to take the blood pressure medicine or or you know that there’s a better way to do it,
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then come in and get the analysis and we can see and oftentimes it’s remediable and it’s
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like I don’t need the blood pressure medicine again. You know I needed some CoQ10 and I needed
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some fish oil and I need this little herb and another one of these things that’s really big
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is I need some more nitric oxide in my body. There’s another little thing that these
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these little capillaries they they spasm if they don’t have enough nitric oxide and you know
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you give people a beet juice extract and they make nitric oxide and their blood pressure goes down.
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In fact in a study that was done at the University of Houston by a real researcher he
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compared blood pressure medicine in lowering blood pressure versus the beet juice extract
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and the beet juiced extract was better than any of the drugs,. So there’s ways around
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this and modern medicine is wonderful and I love it but basic common sense is even better
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to do things that return your physiology to normal because all these blood pressures medicines have
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side effects they have true real side effects and like I said half the people who get prescribed them
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don’t even take them because they don’t want to put up with the side effects
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or they don’t want to spend the money on the tablets.
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So this is blood pressure in a nutshell, hope this helps.
