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My old office manager J.F. was on beta-blockers for high blood pressure. I put her on a treadmill once to give her a test and nothing happened. She got extremely short of breath, but her heart couldn’t keep up. It was still at 80 bpm. She couldn’t challenge her heart and make it stronger because of the drug from her cardiologist. How did this happen? Because no one has messed up modern medicine more than cardiologists. They’re all about the methodology of using heart drugs and technology, but are opposed to the general concept of analyzing your health and how to improve it. It’s a true but sad state of affairs that a cardiologist can’t tell you any more about how to improve the health of your heart than the average person you meet on the street. They know virtually nothing about it. They know how to use drugs. But the drugs are not health enhancing. In fact, there are no categories of cardiac drugs that I don’t disagree with. One by one, I ruled all the drugs out. For example, if you are getting treatment for high blood pressure, you might be on beta blockers. But think of what cardiologists are doing there. They’re now giving you a drug that blocks the regulation of your heart, down-regulates your capacity to get your heart rate up, and suppresses your heart’s natural ionotropic capacity to beat more firmly. Initially, beta-blockers sort of work to artificially bring down your blood pressure, and your heart will calm down, but now you can never get the benefit of exercise. So over time, beta-blockers will turn your heart into a fat, lazy, incompetent water balloon. You already had high blood pressure to deal with, now you have a gross de-conditioning of your heart. But there are other steps you can take to lower your blood pressure naturally. And when you do, your chance of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke go back to normal. It’s as if you never had high blood pressure in the first place. Step 1 – Use Nature’s Own Blood Pressure “Prescription.” I’m talking about magnesium, your body’s natural blood vessel relaxer. I’ve used it in my practice with great results. It helps balance potassium, sodium and calcium, which all affect blood pressure. There are many studies that show the more magnesium you get the lower your blood pressure will be. Why take a drug when this overlooked mineral can have the same effect? New research even finds that if you get enough magnesium you have a lower risk of dying from any cause. The study followed 4,203 people over ten years, and found that the rate of death from all causes was 10 times higher for people getting the least magnesium.1 And the rate of death from heart problems was more than 50% higher for those with low magnesium. You can get more magnesium by eating nuts, seeds, dairy products and dark green, leafy vegetables. But modern farming practices have depleted much of the mineral content in our soil, so there’s not much magnesium in vegetables any more. Magnesium used to be in your drinking water but water with high mineral content – hard water – fell out of favor because most people don’t like the taste. If you can’t get enough magnesium through food, you can take a supplement. I recommend between 600 and 1000 mg a day. Take it with vitamin B6. It will increase the amount of magnesium that accumulates in your cells. Step 2 – Toss The Processed Salt. Salt itself isn’t bad. We naturally crave salty foods. In fact, when your blood is at its healthiest, it’s slightly salty. Unfortunately, the salt you find in most foods today isn’t even close to what Mother Nature intended. It’s bleached and refined. When they’re done making it into the white stuff that goes into packaged foods and your salt shaker it’s like franken-salt, with residual chemicals from the processing. Try to avoid the foods that have the most processed salt. Bottled salad dressing, cured meats (beef jerky, salami), processed cheese, salt-covered snack foods and pickled foods (like olives and dill pickles). Instead, look for sea salt. It’s unrefined, and has all the minerals and co-factors nature meant salt to have, like potassium and magnesium. Regular salt is almost pure sodium chloride. Natural sea salt has sodium chloride too, but also has over 50 other minerals (including magnesium) with all the co-factors and trace elements nature intended real salt to have. To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD 1. Reffelmann T, Ittermann T, Dörr M, Völzke H, Reinthaler M, Petersmann A, Felix SB. “Low serum magnesium concentrations predict cardiovascular and all-cause mortality.” Atherosclerosis. 2011 Jun 12. Epub ahead of print. |
