Three Surpising Ways To Prevent The Consequences Of High Blood Pressure

On this World Health Day, you will be seeing a lot about high blood pressure. You can read about how hypertension is pervasive around the world, and 90 percent of the residents of industrialized countries will be diagnosed with high blood pressure at some time in their lives. You can read about how high blood pressure raises the risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, and how high blood pressure can be controlled by following the so-called DASH diet.

The Deadly Trio of Hypertension, Obesity, and Renal Disease

In your everyday life, you will likely already have noticed that not everyone who has high blood pressure is overweight, and not everyone who is overweight has high blood pressure. Just about every person who suffers from kidney disease, however, also has high blood pressure, and a significant percentage of people who have high blood pressure will eventually develop kidney disease if they do not succumb to heart attack or stroke first.

The progressive worsening of kidney disease and hypertension, however, turns out to be dependent on hormones that are, or are not, produced by fat cells.

High blood pressure worsens kidney damage and kidney damage worsens high blood pressure. The fat cells, however, enter the process by releasing too much of a hormone called leptin or too little of a hormone called adiponectin.

Too Much Protein Is as Big a Problem as Too Much Fat

When fat cells produce more leptin, the kidneys then have to work much harder to filter the bloodstream of the byproducts of "leftover" amino acids, namely urea and sugar. We often think of protein as a free food, but the reality is that our bodies have to break down protein into amino acids, and then reassemble the amino acids in a precise order to make the human proteins. (The protein from a steak or cereal or milk or soy won't "fit" in human tissue in its raw form, after all.) 

If there is too much protein in a person's diet, the liver uses that excess protein to make sugar, with urea being produced as a byproduct. Urea is toxic, so the kidneys have to filter it out. When fat cells release too much of a hormone called leptin, however, the kidneys strain to filter out protein, too. They release other hormones that force more blood through their glomerular filturation apparatus, by raising the person's blood pressure.

This is the underlying process that causes what is widely known as "essential" or "idiopathic" high blood pressure, which was not very well understood by science until very recently.