What’s REALLY Keeping Your Blood Pressure High (& How to Fix It)

Your blood pressure medication may be lowering one of the very nutrients needed to support healthy blood pressure. Discover what causes high blood pressure and why your blood pressure won’t go down, despite treatment.

Why your blood pressure won’t go down even with your medication. The medication that you’re taking now might actively be depleting the very thing that is supposed to be lowering your blood pressure. So, number one, you’re taking medication that’s depleting something that should be lowering your blood pressure. But now that it’s not there, it can’t do that. Thiazide diuretics are the number one prescribed blood pressure drug in America taken by over 40 million people.

So, here’s how they work. They flush out excess sodium through the kidneys, lowering the volume of fluid, bringing the pressure down. What they don’t tell you is it also flushes out magnesium. Magnesium is a key mineral that helps keep the smooth muscles in the vascular system relaxed. And 30% of the people who take this end up having low magnesium on a blood test.

If you have low magnesium on a blood test, you are severely deficient. It’s very difficult for a magnesium deficiency to show up in the blood because normally you only have 1% of all the magnesium in your body in that blood. And most of it’s in the bone, it’s in the muscle. And so, when you’re deficient, the body’s going to rob from the bone and the muscle pushing the blood before it shows up low. So, the fact that 30% show deficiency of magnesium in the blood is significant.

So, in other words, this medication definitely depletes magnesium in a big way. Without magnesium, the arteries become more constricted because calcium cannot be pumped out of the cells. And if there’s too much calcium, you get high blood pressure. This is why they have a calcium channel blocker as a medication for hypertension. Well, guess what?

Magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker. Magnesium is also a natural beta-blocker, which is another medication that people take. A beta-blocker is something to lower adrenaline or the sympathetic nervous system. Magnesium naturally does that. It lowers the sympathetic nervous system.

There’s also a potassium connection because these diuretics also deplete potassium. Potassium is a physiological relaxer of the body, too. It works along with magnesium, and it keeps the arteries elastic or relaxed. It’s actually protective of the kidney, as well, unless someone has advanced kidney disease, in which case you need to check with your doctor before taking either one of these. But typically, if you have enough potassium, it really supports the vascular system and the kidneys.

But the problem is this common medication for hypertension depletes not only magnesium, but potassium. And so now we are depleting two minerals that are supposed to help us keep the blood pressure down, which can also counter your ability for that medication to work, because you’re getting rid of the things that are supposed to help you. What’s unique about potassium is you need a lot of it per day, 4,700 mg. Rarely does anyone even get half of that. There’s some significant credible research, I’ll put it down below in the description, that shows that early humans got a lot more than 4,700 mg per day.

They got between 8,000 to 15,000 mg per day. So if we compare this, early humans with modern day, we’re getting just a fraction of the potassium that we really need. So it could be the bigger reason why people have blood pressure problems in the first place is is of low potassium because you’re just not getting it and magnesium. One really important thing you need to know is potassium cannot work without magnesium as the cofactor. So, there are people that have hypertension and they take a bunch of potassium and they see no results.

Well, it could be because they don’t have enough magnesium. A vitamin D deficiency can also cause hypertension and people that get enough vitamin D a lot of times can help lower their blood pressure. And the reason I’m even bringing this up is because vitamin D is dependent on the magnesium. So, here’s a person who’s taking a bunch of potassium or let’s say vitamin D and they’re low in magnesium, they’re not going to see results. And also with magnesium, doctors will tell patients they’re on this drug to go take potassium or get a prescription for potassium.

If you take a look at how much you’re getting per tablet or capsule, it only comes in like a 99 mg tablet, okay? Now, think about this. 99 mg divided by 4,700, you’re talking about 47 of those pills per day if you were going to try to get all of your potassium. Now, of course, you’re probably not going to do that because you’re going to get some of it from food, but the point is that most potassium pills come in these tiny amounts that honestly, it’s so insignificant. I don’t even know if it’s going to contribute to making a change or replacing what these drugs are flushing out to the kidneys.

So, we have number one, medication causing depletion of minerals. Number two, insulin resistance. When you consume refined sugar and refined carbohydrates, what happens is you will increase a hormone called insulin and that insulin is then taking that glucose and putting it into the cell, okay? But if you take a lot of the sugar and starch, what’s going to happen is your body’s going to say, “Wait a second. This is too toxic.

We have to shut down and resist this glucose. ” This means that you’re not going to get as much glucose in the cell anymore. Well, we have this resistance, but we have a lot of insulin in the background doing the work to keep your blood glucose normal. We’re actually setting the person up for diabetes, and one of the first signs before diabetes could be even hypertension because what’s happening to your arteries is your arteries are getting stiffer and stiffer and stiffer. And then one day they look at your blood pressure and say, “Wow, you have hypertension.

We have to treat it. ” But they don’t look earlier. They rarely test your insulin. There’s some hardcore data, credible [snorts] medical research. I’m going to put the links down below that going on a low-carb diet can reduce your blood pressure by 10 points.

Now, sometimes in the research, you’ll see that diet or lifestyle factors have a modest effect on chronic disease. But what if you combined a few of these together? Let’s say you combined changing your diet with exercise, reducing your stress, or getting more sun, or sleeping more. The effects of medication won’t even come close to the effects of using lifestyle factors to help reduce your blood pressure. If your environment is off, everything else struggles.

It’s like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel.

But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest, and until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Now, a lot of the strategies for blood pressure are operating off the assumption a lot of your blood pressure is coming from too much sodium.

Well, that might be true, but a lot of the research now is showing it’s not quite the case because when you lower sodium, you also create other problems like increasing the sympathetic nervous system, increasing cortisol, they have problems sleeping. Then, the blood pressure goes up just because they have insomnia. But, the sodium is balanced out with potassium. If you want to regulate sodium effectively, why not incre