Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Managing high blood pressure without drugs
Conventional healthcare and dietary advice are, unfortunately, virtually useless in providing effective strategies on how to manage blood pressure naturally and nutritionally. They have, for instance, the DASH diet that can reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure by a few millimeters but not more. They provide bland advice like lose weight or move more. Yet there are effective strategies that you can adopt that powerfully reduce and typically normalize blood pressure. Such strategies may sound unconventional but are really efforts to restore your physiology to mimic that of populations who enjoy lifelong normal blood pressure.
In this episode of the Defiant Health podcast, let’s discuss these strategies that can set you free from the tyranny of the healthcare system and their over-reliance on pharmaceuticals to control blood pressure.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamDavisMD
Blog: WilliamDavisMD.com
Membership website for two-way Zoom: InnerCircle.DrDavisInfiniteHealth.co
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Conventional health care and dietary advice are, unfortunately, virtually useless in providing effective strategies on how to manage blood pressure naturally and nutritionally. They have, for instance, the DASH diet that can reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure by a few millimeters, but no more. They provide bland advice like lose weight or move more. Yet there are strategies that you can adopt that powerfully reduce and typically normalize blood pressure. Such strategies may sound unconventional at first, but are really efforts to restore your physiology to mimic that of populations who enjoy lifelong normal blood pressure. In this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, let's discuss these strategies that can set you free from the tyranny of the healthcare system and their over-reliance on pharmaceuticals to control blood pressure. Can blood pressure be normalized using natural methods and not resorting to the use of pharmaceuticals? Yes, absolutely. In fact, there may be great advantages in doing it the natural way. For one thing, there's an issue called residual risk. That's an issue my colleagues talk about, referring to the fact well established that if you have hypertension and you're put on blood pressure medication typically several. Let's say, the first choice in drugs typically is a thiazide diuretic like chlorothalidone or hydrochlorothiazide. Then on top of that maybe they add a beta blocker like Lopressor or metoprolol or atenolol. They may add a calcium channel blocker like amlodipine, or an ACE inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker. These are drugs like lisinopril or telmasartan or losartan. So it's not uncommon, for instance, to have somebody on two, three, four blood pressure medications. So let's say that person started with very high blood pressure, now the blood pressure is normal let's say 120 over 80, on three hypertension drugs. Here's the problem Even though that person has a normal blood pressure on those three drugs, they are still exposed to substantial cardiovascular risk from high blood pressure with medication does not absolve you of all the excess risk, cardiovascular risk and other risks of hypertension. So medications to treat high blood pressure is a deeply flawed area. Now there's also side effects. Now sometimes these side effects are glossed over by my colleagues but they can be quite significant. So that class of mild diuretics that I mentioned, the hydrochlorothiazide and chlorothaldone diuretics those cause fairly significant loss of minerals in your urine, but mostly potassium and magnesium. For that reason sometimes my colleagues will prescribe supplements or prescription supplements potassium and magnesium to compensate for that. But it's not uncommon to lose control over those two things hypokalemia, low potassium, or hypomagnesemia, low magnesium. What's the importance of that? Well, there are long-term issues like loss of magnesium leads to bone thinning and heart rhythm disorders, but both also lead to sudden cardiac death. You don't hear too much about that, but I can tell you, having spent decades working in cath labs and coronary care units and ICUs, this is an everyday phenomenon. Someone is admitted through the emergency room after being resuscitated from a cardiac arrest sudden cardiac death and they're found to have a very low potassium or a very low magnesium, or both very commonly, and the life-saving maneuver is to intravenously give them large doses of those two things. So that's a common side effect, a common side effect of diuretics.
William Davis, MD:How about those beta blockers like metoprolol, atenolol, sotolol, many others? Well, they amplify insulin resistance and we'll talk about the importance of that. Insulin resistance being a driver of high blood pressure as well as numerous other health conditions. In other words, you're given a drug that actually leads to problems. Specifically, that increase in insulin resistance caused by a beta blocker increases your likelihood of becoming pre-diabetic and a type 2 diabetic. In other words, the drugs are not flawless, they're not foolproof, they're loaded with problems. So we're going to talk about how you can normalize blood pressure naturally. Now, when you normalize blood pressure naturally. Of course, there's no side effects. There's just no drug involved and you're not exposed to that awful issue of residual risk, because you're normalizing blood pressure the way it's supposed to be done.
William Davis, MD:Now are there living examples of this? Yes, many of them. So one of the most studied phenomena in hunter-gatherer populations, that is, populations of humans the few remaining who live off the land. They hunt, they gather, they fish, they gather eggs, they dig in the dirt for roots and tubers, gather berries, but they don't go to supermarkets, they don't shop in a butcher aisle, they don't eat breakfast cereals all the things that we're exposed to. Nor are they exposed to antibiotics and other factors. Well, those populations have been shown repeatedly over the past 50 years to have normal blood pressure. Now, none of these people take blood pressure medication. They live outdoors, they live their lives in the natural way that we're adapted to, we've evolved to, and yet have no high blood pressure. Even more interestingly, when these people migrate to urban centers so let's say the Maasai or other indigenous populations move to an urban center they become hypertensive. Many of them become hypertensive, sometimes severely. So these are the people who can have blood pressures of 210 over 110, very dangerous levels of high blood pressure. Yet just months or years earlier, living their natural lives, they had normal blood pressure. So I think there's an important lesson for us to take from that. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about is your way to revert back to the style of living that those people enjoyed who had normal blood pressures, without medication.
William Davis, MD:So there are two primary processes we're going to focus on. One is to normalize insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is ubiquitous now in modern populations. It affects nearly all adults and that's a process that causes your pancreas to overproduce huge quantities of insulin and that causes an accumulation of abdominal fat and leads to increased risk for heart disease, dementia, cancers, etc. So normalizing insulin resistance fundamental. Also normalizing or reducing inflammation. Those two go hand in hand. Inflammation gets high, blood pressure expands abdominal fat. More abdominal fat causes insulin resistance and more inflammation. There's a vicious circle in this whole process. But the two processes we want to address insulin resistance and inflammation. Well, how do you do that? It's very easy.
William Davis, MD:Let's restore your diet to the way it should have been all along, that is, you should have killed animals for your breakfast with a spear, bow and arrow or an axe, dragged it back to your camp Eat the whole animal. You don't just eat the meat, the lean meat, you eat the liver, the brain, the stomach, the kidneys and the meat and you save the bones and the remnants of tendons, ligaments and other things and you boil in water to make stews and soups. You add vegetables, root vegetables, etc. That's how you should have eaten. Well, that is a lifestyle that is devoid, absent all wheat grains and has minimal sugars. So we revert back to that. That alone has spectacular effects.
William Davis, MD:But you have to ignore the nonsense that comes from dietary guidelines and awful dietary studies where they did this. They say okay, people who eat more whole grains compared to people who eat white flour products have lower blood pressure. They interpret that to mean whole grains are better for blood pressure, and that is true in a small way. What they didn't ask was, if that's true, what's the effect of no grains at all? No wheat, no grains. Those studies have been done and there has been a dramatic drop in blood pressure, probably because the amylopectin, not the gluten. The gluten has other effects the amylopectin, a carbohydrate unique to wheat and grains that causes insulin resistance, which leads to sodium and water retention. So probably not sodium. By the way, it's not water, it's the sodium water retention caused by insulin resistance triggered by the amylopectin A, which people eat in huge quantities, by the way, and so we're normalizing insulin resistance through the diet.
William Davis, MD:Then we address common nutrient deficiencies that add to when they're absent. When they're lacking, they add to insulin resistance Vitamin D, magnesium, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids. These are nutrients that are hard to obtain living a modern life. For instance, if you drink water from your tap or filtered water or distilled water, all that water has been filtered. It has to be filtered because most water nowadays is contaminated by sewage, by farm runoff and other chemicals, compounds, pharmaceuticals, etc. So you must have your water filtered. Water filtration is very efficient, very effective at removing all magnesium and the produce you buy, the vegetables you buy, typically grown on a farm using modern techniques where the soil has been depleted of magnesium and magnesium contents about 80 to 90 percent less than it would be, say, in a wild growing plant. So that leaves us with profound magnesium deficiency.
William Davis, MD:Magnesium has a profound effect on blood pressure, so we're going to restore magnesium, so we supplement various forms of magnesium. We have a lot of choices Magnesium, malate magnesium, chelate, glycinate, bisglycinate and many others. We do avoid magnesium oxide because it's very poorly absorbed and we try to get about 450 to 500 milligrams of the magnesium, not the entire molecule. Like if it says magnesium malate 1,300 milligrams. Look on the back and see how much magnesium that is. It's going to be about 130 milligrams or so. So you may have to take four of those tablets or you can get powders, but you want to get around 450 to 500 milligrams of magnesium total per day if your kidneys are normal.
William Davis, MD:Vitamin D Because most of us lead indoor lives, we wear clothes in public covering much of the body's surface area and we are aging. As we age we lose the capacity to effectively activate vitamin D in the skin and, of course, you can't get vitamin D from the diet. So we supplement vitamin D as an oil-based gel cap, only for a short absorption. Capsules with powder and tablets are very poorly or erratically absorbed. So we try to get a dose of vitamin D daily that raises your 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level to 60 to 70 nanograms. That's what I've been aiming for. It works very well. We've never seen an episode of toxicity I've been aiming for. It works very well. We've never seen an episode of toxicity. Now, that's a bit of an oversimplification. Vitamin D needs to be adjusted over time to your blood level and it will be affected by your body size, how much fat you have, age, race and some other things. In general, though, most adults require about 6,000 units of the D3 oil-based gel cap to achieve that target level, and that adds further to all these beneficial effects, including a reduction of insulin resistance and inflammation.
William Davis, MD:Iodine Iodine is often forgotten by most doctors and other health care providers. Lack of iodine was a major public health problem for all throughout human history, until 1924, when the FDA and other agencies figured out that goiters enlarged thyroid glands on the neck were due to a lack of iodine. This was a debilitating, often fatal problem for many people up until 1924. So the FDA, recognizing that the American public was illiterate there was no internet, no radio, no TV they just waged a poster campaign that said use more iodized salt, keep your family goiter free. Because they persuaded the salt manufacturers to add iodine, people listened, added iodized salt, goiters went away. Well then, fast forward 50 plus years. The FDA saw that people were becoming more sensitive to salt, developing congestive heart failure, hypertension, other issues. They told everybody stop using so much salt, forgetting that it was their original advice to reduce goiters.
William Davis, MD:So guess what's coming back? Not just goiters, but also thyroid disease is escalating. So you could use iodized salt. There's some issues with that. I prefer you use kelp tablets, dried seaweed tablets very easy, inexpensive way to get your iodine. If it says each 30 milligram tablet provides 150 micrograms of iodine, we've been aiming for about 300 to 400 thereabouts.
William Davis, MD:Doesn't have to be precise Micrograms of iodine. That has worked great. It's more than the recommended daily allowance, the RDA, because the RDA was originally developed many years ago. Based on answering this question what quantity of iodine is required to not have a goiter? Well, there's more to thyroid health and optimization of thyroid status than not having a goiter. So I believe the dose is higher. We've been using that higher dose, which never leads to iodine toxicity. Beware of the conversations telling people to take these mega doses of iodine like 20,000 micrograms, 30,000 micrograms. It's a very dangerous practice. I've seen so many now episodes or instances of iodine toxicity, which is severe hypothyroidism, so please don't do that.
William Davis, MD:And then, lastly, omega-3 fatty acids. We should get omega-3 fatty acids from fish consumption and shellfish, but we can't consume all we want because fish has been contaminated by industrialization, with mercury, shellfish, with cadmium, and those two accumulate in your body and they really do lead to toxicity. So we have to minimize or limit our intake of those things. We use omega-3 fatty acids to compensate. Now, I believe the ideal dose of omega-3 fatty acids is at least 3,000 milligrams of EPA and DHA per day.
William Davis, MD:If you're dealing with coronary disease, I would use 3,600 milligrams or more of EPA. It's a high dose. You're better off buying high-potency forms. So, for instance, you bought fish salt capsules, where one capsule provides 180 milligrams EPA, 120 milligrams DHA. You're going to need 10 capsules to get 3,000 milligrams. So buy a high-potency capsule. You can get these. They're more costly. So buy a high-potency capsule. You can get these. They're more costly. Let's say, a capsule that provides 1,000 milligrams of the combination of EPA and DHA, in which case you can take three or four and you've got the ideal dose. Now, those four things magnesium, vitamin D, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids they're not random, they're chosen because they're lacking in modern lifestyles not because of the diet, but because of the quirks of modern lifestyles. But when combined, minimize insulin resistance and inflammation and are even more powerful in the context of the diet.
William Davis, MD:Now next, gastrointestinal microbiome. We have all, as modern people, been exposed to all sorts of things, all sorts of factors that have disrupted the gastrointestinal microbiome, starting with antibiotics. Most adults have been wildly overexposed to antibiotics, and each exposure further damages the composition of your gastrointestinal microbiome, killing off beneficial species and allowing the overproliferation of unhealthy species. One of the consequences of that is that when you lose beneficial species, unhealthy, mostly fecal species, colonic species overpopulate in the colon first and then are allowed to ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine. When that situation occurs, which is extremely common, it's at least 50% of people with high blood pressure. I think it's probably more towards 100%, but it's very common. So you have fecal microbes that have infested the 24 feet of small intestine.
William Davis, MD:The small intestine is ill-equipped to deal with this. The colon is better at dealing with fecal microbes, but not the small intestine. Small intestine is the part of your GI tract designed for absorption of nutrients, and so it's very permeable. So when there's 24 feet duodenum, jejunum, ileum filled with fecal microbes that only live for a few hours, when they die, they shed their toxic components, such as something called endotoxin, into the intestines. That then gains access into your bloodstream because of the increased permeability of the small intestine that first enters the portal venous system. That drains the intestines to the liver, so your liver takes a beating and then the liver filters it, but still a lot of that endotoxin gets into the systemic circulation and that is a major contributor to high blood pressure, as well as numerous other problems Coronary disease, dementia risk, numerous cancers, fibromyalgia, restless leg syndrome, on and on and on. So it's a ubiquitous process, it's extremely common and it's an extremely potent driver of high blood pressure.
William Davis, MD:So we address that Now. I address it using my method that I did not have high expectations for but has proven to be far more powerful than I ever expected. That is, making something I call SIBO yogurt. It's not yogurt. It looks and smells like yogurt, using microbes to ferment human-sourced microbes, not the silly microbes used in commercial yogurt making. Those are microbes like Lactobacillus bulgaricus, lactobacillus acidophilus, streptococcus thermophilus. Those are beneficial in a very small way. If you bought commercial yogurt, you wouldn't say your life has changed right. It wouldn't have any substantial effect. It is beneficial, it's okay, provided it's not filled with high fructose corn syrup and other sugar and other additives we're going to do instead.
William Davis, MD:Start with very interesting microbes that have two properties. One they colonize the small intestine where SIBO occurs and they produce bactericids, natural antibiotics effective in killing or suppressing the species of SIBO. We're going to ferment it using my method of prolonged fermentation to allow the microbes to double 12 times over 36 hours, far longer than commercial yogurt making or home yogurt making, because this is not about making yogurt, it's about getting very high microbial counts. We do that by fermenting for 36 hours at human body temperature. These are human source microbes, so about 9,802. So just for round numbers, I say 100 degrees Fahrenheit and then we consume a half cup per day. Now you can if you have a really bad case of SIBO, you can ferment each microbe individually to get the highest counts, but it works just fine to co-ferment all three and then consume a half cup per day and do that for a minimum of four weeks and intermittently forever thereafter, like three times a week until at least we figure out a way to make these microbes take up permanent residence. Haven't figured that out yet.
William Davis, MD:Now, do those things the diet reverting back to the diet that humans have adapted to over thousands and thousands of generations, that is associated confidently with normal blood pressure address common nutrient deficiencies unique to modern populations because of the peculiarities of modern life, like filtered water and living indoors, and then address seabone endotoxemia.
William Davis, MD:Now, what if you don't have seabone endotoxemia? Well, those three microbes have so many spectacular benefits anyway. You don't have to have SIBO to enjoy all the benefits Skin benefits, gastrointestinal benefits, immune benefits, musculature benefits, hormonal benefits, reproductive benefits so you don't have to have SIBO to enjoy the SIBO yogurt benefits, reproductive benefits. So you don't have to have SIBO to enjoy the SIBO yogurt, but know that this is a way to normalize blood pressure without resorting to the use of pharmaceuticals. Now, if you want more detail on all this dosing frequency, where to obtain those microbes, for instance see all my resources, my books, including the Super Gut Book that has a lot of these recipes, my blog, williamdavismdcom, where I have several thousand blog posts detailing all these ideas, and, of course, my membership website, which is innercircledrdavisinfinitehealthcom, where we discuss these kinds of ideas, how to improve on them, share experiences and provide support.
