How to Prevent High Blood Pressure

How to Prevent Heart Disease

The painless, easy way to keep your heart ticking and your blood pressure normal without high blood pressure medication. If you have had to use high blood pressure medication for up to a year but want to discover and use herbal medicine, I would highly recommend the  protocol outlined below to keep your blood pressure normal and avoid anymore medication.

Garlic is an old herb used by man for hundred of years.  It also benefits your immune and circulatory systems and will help normalize your blood pressure while keeping your blood thin without having to take blood thinners and endure nasty side effects.

Capsicum is spicy (hot) herb that promotes blood flow to the extremities.  It contains many valuable nutrients such as vitamins A, B and C with iron and calcium.  Even though it is hot it actually does no harm the lining of your stomach. It also stimulates your digestive juices and is considered to be a nervine herb which is of great benefit to a healthy heart rhythm.

Hawthorn berry or leaves can be bitter but is famous in Europe as a heart stimulant.  It will also assist your body in strengthening all the heart's tissues and is considered to be a heart tonic by many herbalists. This herb is adaptogenic in that it has the ability to dilate and help the body open up constricted blood vessels.  This is how it can help to lower blood pressure since constricted blood vessels will increase blood pressure automatically.  Dilated blood vessels will allow and increase blood flow to your heart.

These three herbs that are readily available everywhere can benefit your heart and your health without breaking the bank, causing you any inconvenience and if used every day will become habit forming with very good results.

Almonds or Statin Drugs for High Cholesterol?

It is great to see that the University of Toronto played a key role in the recent study of how eating almonds, soy protein and vegetables could lower one's cholesterol as effectively as statin drugs. We have long advocated to our friends and family that we are what we eat. The things we do to our bodies we would not do to our cars.

For example, would we run our car without a tune-up at certain mileage intervals? The body's tune-up is cleansing at certain intervals - perhaps, at the change of each season or could be when we switch to Daylight Saving Time. Would we run our car without oil changes? The oil change for our body is daily physical activity to keep our motor (heart) working in peak condition and keep oxygenating our blood so it can flow easily.

Recently, a colleague used a natural diet guide (my accumulated knowledge and creative cooking recipes) that is very similar in composition to the Portfolio Diet, along with 40-minutes of exercise 4-times a week to lose weight. She had not been following her own advice - had been working 16-hour days and neglecting "herself" to her own detriment.

She was lucky that we saw the warning sign (unexplained hypertension). She had done her annual physical and all her results were good: normal cholesterol levels, etc. except that she was overweight. For her medium frame, she was carrying several pounds over the normal maximum of 140-pounds and she knew. After all, she had never been so heavy even when she was pregnant with her children. Her body was screaming, "Help Me!” we listened, followed-up with immediate action to restore her health and rescue her from imminent heart disease.

If only we can get more doctors to encourage overweight individuals to look seriously at diet and exercise as a way to heart health and not look to weight loss surgery, we would be well on the way to "an ounce of prevention being better than a pound of cure".

This study was conducted during American Heart Month (February) and just in time for National Nutrition Month (March). Thanks to the Almond Board of California, the University of Toronto Research team, (Dr. David Jenkins and Dr. Cyril Kendall) Loblaws Brand and all who made this study possible for bringing it to the attention of us, the public.