Blood pressure problems are extremely common in today’s nutrition poor lifestyles. As a result, many in our population are on medications to lower blood pressure. Rather than helping, this actually creates many problems.
There are several main classes of blood pressure drugs:
- Beta blockers (“ols”)
- Angiotensen converting inhibitors (“prils”)
- Diuretics
- Angiotensen II receptor blockers or ARBs (“ars”)
- Calcium channel blockers
Sounds like we have all kinds of options, right??
- Beta blockers increase the risk of both stroke and diabetes
- ARBs and diuretics have concerns over increased cancer risk.
- Diuretics combined with calcium channel increase the risk of heart attacks.
Still sound promising?
As if this wasn’t enough of a concern, this particular article looks at the risk of gout in patients taking high blood pressure medications. If you ask anyone who experiences gout, they will tell you it’s not a whole lot of fun. Gout is also strongly associated with prediabetes (uric acid levels rise with prediabetes).
While calcium channel blockers and losartan actually lowered the risk of gout. The data was not so pretty with the other classes of drugs:
- 2.36 times the risk for diuretics
- 1.48 increased risk for β blockers
- 1.24 greater risk for angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors
- 1.29 for non-losartan angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs)
The bottom line is, as always, that lifestyle is the ONLY way to lower blood pressure that will not kill you some other way first. There are many changes to make to lower blood pressure through lifestyle. They include:
- Use of the Resperate or meditation to lower blood pressure
- The full list is here