What Affects Blood Pressure?
Blood pressure is one of the most important measurements of your overall health. It reflects how hard your heart is working to move blood through your body.
Every heartbeat pushes blood through your arteries, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every cell, including your brain, muscles, and organs. Your body constantly adjusts your blood pressure to make sure these tissues receive the blood they need.
Healthy blood pressure is a balance. If it is too high for a long time, it can damage your heart, brain, kidneys, eyes, and blood vessels. If it is too low, your organs may not receive enough oxygen, causing dizziness, fatigue, or even fainting.
Your body controls blood pressure through the heart, blood vessels, kidneys, hormones, nervous system, and brain. These systems work together every second to respond to changes such as standing up, exercising, eating, sleeping, or feeling stressed.
What are you doing to positvely affect your blood pressure?
Even small amounts of weight loss and a healthy diet can help reduce high blood pressure. Food as medicine. Food affects the gut and the microbiome and more on that below. Plant medicine offers help in healthy blood pressure. Even just small impacts day after day, make a difference over time. Getting a good night sleep is critical and screening for sleep apnea is important. About a third of the population's blood pressure is sensitive to salt, so reducing it can be helpful for some. Regular exercise is important as well. Regulating blood sugar and cholesterol are key to healthy arteries. Stress management, emotional regulation are also key to helping the body keep blood pressure just right.
Regular blood work can check in on cholesterol, blood sugars, inflammation factors, kidney function, and thyroid function. Salivary hormone testing can aid in cortisol and stress level analysis.
Yet still 15-20% of patients with hypertension are not regulated by dietary, exercise, conventional medications and other lifestyle factors.
What about the gut microbiome?
The gut microbiome ferments fibre from a healthy diet and makes short chain fatty acids and other key metabolites. These products of the microbiome affect organ health body wide, and are a new interest in blood pressure control research. More to come on this as research expands.
Warm regards,
Dr. Laura M. Brown
NATUROPATHIC DOCTOR
