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.

Three Things You Can Do To Lower Your Blood Pressure, Lower Your Weight, And Preserve Kidney Health

Well, that's all very interesting, but what good does it do to know that there's some hormone made by your fat cells that makes your kidneys work harder by raising your blood pressure? It turns out that there are five things you can do that don't just lower your blood pressure but also lower your weight and help to preserve kidney function.

1. If you work a night shift, try to get on the day shift.

Just about nothing is harder on your overall health than working night shifts, especially night shifts on an irregular schedule. When you don't get at least six uninterrupted hours of sleep at night, your brain doesn't have a chance to make melatonin so it can "sort out" its responses to leptin made by your fat cells.

It never gets to process the "OK, we're full, you don't need to eat any more right now" message from your belly fat. It doesn't get to override the message to your kidneys that they need to work overtime to filter urea and amino acids out of your blood. And your heart has to beat harder and faster to keep blood going to your kidneys so they can filter it. 

It's more important to get nighttime rest, in many cases, than it is to lose weight. If you work the night shift, try to do something about that.

2. A couple days a week, make a point of eating less, even if you feel a need to eat high-calorie foods later.

There is growing evidence that the human body was made for periodic food deprivation. Yes, that means that we actually "run better" when we eat lightly about two days a week.

If you have one or two days a week in which you skip a meal or you just eat a healthy snack instead of a full meal, your fat cells make less leptin, so your blood pressure goes down and your kidneys have a chance to recover from the extra stress. Intermittent caloric deprivation also helps your fat cells make more adiponectin, which lowers your blood pressure.

Adiponectin also helps your fat cells respond to insulin so your body makes less insulin (and thereby stores less fat), and slows down the process atherosclerosis, which stiffens your arteries so blood pressure goes up.

Don't worry if you overeat after you have fasted for day. A single high-calorie, high-fat meal at the end of a fast or lean-eating day won't cancel out the benefits of caloric restriction. Just be sure you don't overeat at more than one meal after you do a fast or a light-eating day.

3. Take omega-3 essential fatty acids.

At least in laboratory tests with mice, the omega-3 essential fatty acids DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) reduce the production of adiponectin.

A dose of just 1,000 mg of DHA + EPA (for this purpose, the proportion of DHA and EPA is not critical) is enough to do some good, and costs just pennies per day. Both fish oil and microalgae oils provide DHA and EPA in a form the body can use right away; flaxseed oil has to be "processed" by the cells to produce the omega-3 essential fatty acids that lower blood pressure.

Even if you take these three steps toward taking control of your blood pressure, you may still need medication to treat your hypertension. We don't ever recommend anyone fail to follow a physician's guidance, and getting control over your blood pressure is the top priority after you have been diagnosed with hypertension. But these three steps may be exactly what is needed in borderline cases of high blood pressure for which your doctor recommends lifestyle changes you may already have made, or they may be what you need to avoid having to take more medication on a long-term basis. And even if you don't need blood pressure drugs at all, these three steps will help you maintain normal weight and keep your kidneys healthier.