What is High Blood Pressure?
There are tens of millions of people who have high blood pressure which means the force of the blood going through the blood vessels is too high.
This in turn can cause damage to these blood vessels.
High blood pressure is commonly treated with medication to help lower it but there are natural ways to lower blood pressure.
In this video you will learn:
- What is high blood pressure?
- The causes of high blood pressure
- Conventional treatments for high blood pressure
- Alternative treatments for high blood pressure
Transcript
View timestamped transcript.
0:00
Hi, it’s Dr Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center. I want to talk to you about a really common problem,
0:05
which is high blood pressure. So blood pressure is measured with a cuff. There’s ranges that are
0:11
normal, somewhat based on age but mostly blood pressure should be in a certain range. There’s
0:16
tens of millions of people who have blood pressure that’s too high and they’re suggested by their
0:20
doctors to go on medication to lower the blood pressure. Now high blood pressure is indeed a
0:25
bad thing. If the blood pressure is too high that means the force going through your blood vessels
0:31
is too high and this force can cause damage to those blood vessels or damage to the cells that
0:37
are on the other side of those blood vessels or cause damage to the cells that are on the
0:43
other side of those blood vessels. So there’s risk to brain, to stroke, to TIAs, there’s,
0:50
there’s risk to kidneys, there’s risk to heart. So we don’t want high blood pressure and high blood
0:56
pressure shouldn’t be ignored. What we want is we want elastic arteries that are very responsive.
1:04
The usual solution to blood pressure is medication and there are medications that relax arteries,
1:11
there are medications that make you pee extra salt out, there’s medications that block calcium from
1:17
getting in and out of cells and sometimes these blood pressure medicines are needed,
1:22
sometimes they’re effective but often times there is a solution where the person doesn’t have to
1:28
keep taking those blood pressure medicines because they just don’t need them anymore.
1:33
Now if we think of it, we’ve got a system where we’ve got a pump,
1:38
and we’ve got blood vessels and we got fluid flowing through those blood vessels.
1:43
In that fluid there are cells which are called red blood cells
1:49
and red blood cells if you measure the diameter the distance across the red blood cell,
1:55
it’s about seven microns, seven millionths of a meter. The capillary bed is four microns.
2:03
So you got to take something that’s this big and it’s got to go through this big.
2:08
Now if we look at the profile in the membrane, the outer skin of the cell of the red blood cell,
2:15
it is supposed to have a balance in that outer skin of four parts omega-6 oils, these are the seed
2:24
oils, the vegetable oils to one part omega-3 oils, which are the fish oils. The average American diet
2:35
is 24 to 1. People are eating fried foods, seed foods, nuts you know vegetable processed vegetable
2:46
oils and their intake is 24 to 1, not four to one. So what do you think these things get made out of?
2:54
They get made out of seed oils at a high ratio and these seed oils make membrane stiff
3:02
and so this membrane is like uh.
3:06
Now if you’re back here with a pump, what do you got to do? You got to pump harder.
3:14
That’s high blood pressure, that’s one cause of high blood pressure,
3:17
you got to get that thing through. Now if the cells on the other side need to get that oxygen,
3:25
if your treatment is give drugs that don’t let the heart pump hard,
3:31
you will lower the blood pressure but you also will not deliver enough oxygen to these cells.
3:38
Now these cells when they don’t get enough oxygen, what they do is they say, I need more
3:42
oxygen and they send a message back up to the brain that then goes back to the heart and says
3:47
you know pump, come on pump and you get this Catch-22, so half the time people would take
3:53
blood pressure medicine, don’t take them because in order to get the dose enough to get the blood
3:57
pressure low, now they can’t get an erection or they get dizzy when they stand up or they
4:02
feel terrible, it’s like I’m not going to do that because most people don’t feel their high blood
4:06
pressure, they don’t have headaches, you know they don’t have, they don’t have, they don’t notice it,
4:11
okay. So that’s just one of the things. It may be that their blood’s too thick for other reasons,
4:17
they don’t have enough vitamin E or the or, or they’re they’re dehydrated all the time.
4:22
It may be that they have a a total body low level of magnesium and potassium.
4:30
So now you have this capillary, right before the capillary there’s a little
4:35
muscular it’s called an arteriole it’s a little muscular thing
4:40
and guess what muscles do if they don’t have enough potassium and magnesium? They spasm. So
4:47
you might have a normal flexible red blood cell but now this thing is spasmed, it’s too small.
4:53
That could cause high blood pressure, okay. You might have deficiencies of other nutrients
5:02
so that the cells are working correctly like vitamin D. Vitamin D is a natural
5:10
anti-hypertensive. You know there’s an epidemic in people with dark skin because they don’t get any
5:18
sunshine or enough sunshine and people with dark skin need way more sunshine to make vitamin D in
5:24
their bodies than people with light skin. You know in Ireland the sun doesn’t come out hardly ever
5:29
so it had to adapt so that a little bit of sun would produce a lot of vitamin D.
5:35
If you’re living in Africa and you’re in the sun all the time or in the Middle East
5:40
people naturally get darker skin and they get immune to sunshine producing vitamin D.
5:45
Now if they live in Chicago and they don’t have any sunshine they don’t get vitamin D.
5:50
And there’s actually published epidemics in people with darker skin who don’t take vitamin D
5:56
who have high blood pressure and you give them vitamin D and their blood pressure goes down.
6:00
So there’s all these reasons why it might be why you have high blood pressure and why we need to
6:07
figure out what is the reason in you. Sometimes people have just too much lead in their kidneys
6:13
or mercury or arsenic and so what we do in someone with high blood pressures okay let’s look at
6:21
all these things and try to optimize them and in many cases the blood pressure goes down.
6:26
It goes down because now the system is actually working the way it’s supposed to work
6:32
and you have physiology that’s now reflecting health
6:37
and the medications aren’t needed. So I’m not saying stop your blood pressure medicine, that’s
6:43
dangerous. I’m not saying if you have high blood pressure you shouldn’t take it. But if you do and
6:49
you don’t want to take the blood pressure medicine or or you know that there’s a better way to do it,
6:54
then come in and get the analysis and we can see and oftentimes it’s remediable and it’s
7:00
like I don’t need the blood pressure medicine again. You know I needed some CoQ10 and I needed
7:05
some fish oil and I need this little herb and another one of these things that’s really big
7:10
is I need some more nitric oxide in my body. There’s another little thing that these
7:15
these little capillaries they they spasm if they don’t have enough nitric oxide and you know
7:21
you give people a beet juice extract and they make nitric oxide and their blood pressure goes down.
7:26
In fact in a study that was done at the University of Houston by a real researcher he
7:31
compared blood pressure medicine in lowering blood pressure versus the beet juice extract
7:38
and the beet juiced extract was better than any of the drugs,. So there’s ways around
7:44
this and modern medicine is wonderful and I love it but basic common sense is even better
7:52
to do things that return your physiology to normal because all these blood pressures medicines have
7:58
side effects they have true real side effects and like I said half the people who get prescribed them
8:05
don’t even take them because they don’t want to put up with the side effects
8:08
or they don’t want to spend the money on the tablets.
8:10
So this is blood pressure in a nutshell, hope this helps.
Hi, it’s Dr Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center. I want to talk to you about a really common problem,
0:05
which is high blood pressure. So blood pressure is measured with a cuff. There’s ranges that are
0:11
normal, somewhat based on age but mostly blood pressure should be in a certain range. There’s
0:16
tens of millions of people who have blood pressure that’s too high and they’re suggested by their
0:20
doctors to go on medication to lower the blood pressure. Now high blood pressure is indeed a
0:25
bad thing. If the blood pressure is too high that means the force going through your blood vessels
0:31
is too high and this force can cause damage to those blood vessels or damage to the cells that
0:37
are on the other side of those blood vessels or cause damage to the cells that are on the
0:43
other side of those blood vessels. So there’s risk to brain, to stroke, to TIAs, there’s,
0:50
there’s risk to kidneys, there’s risk to heart. So we don’t want high blood pressure and high blood
0:56
pressure shouldn’t be ignored. What we want is we want elastic arteries that are very responsive.
1:04
The usual solution to blood pressure is medication and there are medications that relax arteries,
1:11
there are medications that make you pee extra salt out, there’s medications that block calcium from
1:17
getting in and out of cells and sometimes these blood pressure medicines are needed,
1:22
sometimes they’re effective but often times there is a solution where the person doesn’t have to
1:28
keep taking those blood pressure medicines because they just don’t need them anymore.
1:33
Now if we think of it, we’ve got a system where we’ve got a pump,
1:38
and we’ve got blood vessels and we got fluid flowing through those blood vessels.
1:43
In that fluid there are cells which are called red blood cells
1:49
and red blood cells if you measure the diameter the distance across the red blood cell,
1:55
it’s about seven microns, seven millionths of a meter. The capillary bed is four microns.
2:03
So you got to take something that’s this big and it’s got to go through this big.
2:08
Now if we look at the profile in the membrane, the outer skin of the cell of the red blood cell,
2:15
it is supposed to have a balance in that outer skin of four parts omega-6 oils, these are the seed
2:24
oils, the vegetable oils to one part omega-3 oils, which are the fish oils. The average American diet
2:35
is 24 to 1. People are eating fried foods, seed foods, nuts you know vegetable processed vegetable
2:46
oils and their intake is 24 to 1, not four to one. So what do you think these things get made out of?
2:54
They get made out of seed oils at a high ratio and these seed oils make membrane stiff
3:02
and so this membrane is like uh.
3:06
Now if you’re back here with a pump, what do you got to do? You got to pump harder.
3:14
That’s high blood pressure, that’s one cause of high blood pressure,
3:17
you got to get that thing through. Now if the cells on the other side need to get that oxygen,
3:25
if your treatment is give drugs that don’t let the heart pump hard,
3:31
you will lower the blood pressure but you also will not deliver enough oxygen to these cells.
3:38
Now these cells when they don’t get enough oxygen, what they do is they say, I need more
3:42
oxygen and they send a message back up to the brain that then goes back to the heart and says
3:47
you know pump, come on pump and you get this Catch-22, so half the time people would take
3:53
blood pressure medicine, don’t take them because in order to get the dose enough to get the blood
3:57
pressure low, now they can’t get an erection or they get dizzy when they stand up or they
4:02
feel terrible, it’s like I’m not going to do that because most people don’t feel their high blood
4:06
pressure, they don’t have headaches, you know they don’t have, they don’t have, they don’t notice it,
4:11
okay. So that’s just one of the things. It may be that their blood’s too thick for other reasons,
4:17
they don’t have enough vitamin E or the or, or they’re they’re dehydrated all the time.
4:22
It may be that they have a a total body low level of magnesium and potassium.
4:30
So now you have this capillary, right before the capillary there’s a little
4:35
muscular it’s called an arteriole it’s a little muscular thing
4:40
and guess what muscles do if they don’t have enough potassium and magnesium? They spasm. So
4:47
you might have a normal flexible red blood cell but now this thing is spasmed, it’s too small.
4:53
That could cause high blood pressure, okay. You might have deficiencies of other nutrients
5:02
so that the cells are working correctly like vitamin D. Vitamin D is a natural
5:10
anti-hypertensive. You know there’s an epidemic in people with dark skin because they don’t get any
5:18
sunshine or enough sunshine and people with dark skin need way more sunshine to make vitamin D in
5:24
their bodies than people with light skin. You know in Ireland the sun doesn’t come out hardly ever
5:29
so it had to adapt so that a little bit of sun would produce a lot of vitamin D.
5:35
If you’re living in Africa and you’re in the sun all the time or in the Middle East
5:40
people naturally get darker skin and they get immune to sunshine producing vitamin D.
5:45
Now if they live in Chicago and they don’t have any sunshine they don’t get vitamin D.
5:50
And there’s actually published epidemics in people with darker skin who don’t take vitamin D
5:56
who have high blood pressure and you give them vitamin D and their blood pressure goes down.
6:00
So there’s all these reasons why it might be why you have high blood pressure and why we need to
6:07
figure out what is the reason in you. Sometimes people have just too much lead in their kidneys
6:13
or mercury or arsenic and so what we do in someone with high blood pressures okay let’s look at
6:21
all these things and try to optimize them and in many cases the blood pressure goes down.
6:26
It goes down because now the system is actually working the way it’s supposed to work
6:32
and you have physiology that’s now reflecting health
6:37
and the medications aren’t needed. So I’m not saying stop your blood pressure medicine, that’s
6:43
dangerous. I’m not saying if you have high blood pressure you shouldn’t take it. But if you do and
6:49
you don’t want to take the blood pressure medicine or or you know that there’s a better way to do it,
6:54
then come in and get the analysis and we can see and oftentimes it’s remediable and it’s
7:00
like I don’t need the blood pressure medicine again. You know I needed some CoQ10 and I needed
7:05
some fish oil and I need this little herb and another one of these things that’s really big
7:10
is I need some more nitric oxide in my body. There’s another little thing that these
7:15
these little capillaries they they spasm if they don’t have enough nitric oxide and you know
7:21
you give people a beet juice extract and they make nitric oxide and their blood pressure goes down.
7:26
In fact in a study that was done at the University of Houston by a real researcher he
7:31
compared blood pressure medicine in lowering blood pressure versus the beet juice extract
7:38
and the beet juiced extract was better than any of the drugs,. So there’s ways around
7:44
this and modern medicine is wonderful and I love it but basic common sense is even better
7:52
to do things that return your physiology to normal because all these blood pressures medicines have
7:58
side effects they have true real side effects and like I said half the people who get prescribed them
8:05
don’t even take them because they don’t want to put up with the side effects
8:08
or they don’t want to spend the money on the tablets.
8:10
So this is blood pressure in a nutshell, hope this helps.
Helpful Heart Health Resources
- Heart Health - our complete page on heart health / cardiovascular treatment.
