Heart disease (CVD) kills more people than any other illness in the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 15.2 million people died around the world in 2016 from cardiovascular illnesses. Unfortunately, even if a circulatory event doesn't kill the person, it can make their life much less enjoyable and shorten their lifespan.
The good news is that you can lower your chance of a cardiovascular event by making changes to your lifestyle, such as lowering your blood pressure without drugs. An interesting new study suggests that drinking a well-known vegetable juice might help keep blood pressure in check.
What is Blood pressure?
Blood pressure is the amount of force that the blood has on the inside walls of the arteries. One way blood gets from the heart to the rest of the body is through arteries. It is the job of the veins to bring blood back to the heart.
When your blood pressure is too high, it hurts your arteries. Arteries aren't as good at moving blood around the body when they get weak. Cholesterol plaque can also form in the scar tissue that builds up from having high blood pressure for a long time.
Stroke, heart attack, and other heart problems are more likely to happen if you have high blood pressure. You definitely don't want to ignore it.
What Causes Elevated Blood Pressure?
Essential hypertension, which is also called main hypertension, is when high blood pressure builds up over time for no clear reason. Secondary high blood pressure can be linked to a specific secondary cause, such as:
- Kidney problems
- Thyroid disease
- Obstructive sleep apnea
- A heart condition
- Rare metabolic disorders
In addition, your risk of high blood pressure may also increase with the following factors:
- Being overweight
- Smoking
- Drinking too much alcohol
- Eating too much sodium
- Being older
- Family history of hypertension
How to Treat high Blood Pressure
You can lower your blood pressure in a number of ways by cutting back on certain things in your life, such as:
- Dropping weight
- Reducing sodium intake
- Exercising regularly
- Getting more sleep
- Reducing alcohol consumption
Medications
There are some medicines that can help lower blood pressure, but they also have risks. People are often given the following prescriptions:
- Beta-blockers
- Diuretics
- Calcium channel blockers
- Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors
- Angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs)
About Statins
It's possible that your doctor will give you marks to help keep your blood pressure in check. A lot of the time, these drugs are used to lower cholesterol by reducing the buildup of cholesterol plaque in the vessels.
Statins stop cells in the body from working the way they should. Statins stop "bad" LDL cholesterol from reaching the mitochondria of cells. They also stop important nutrients like CoQ10, beta carotene, and vitamin E from getting there. To keep your heart healthy, you need CoQ10, and cholesterol is important for hormone balance, brain function, and many other body functions.
A lot of study is shown in the documentary Statin Nation: The Great Cholesterol Cover Up to support the idea that lower LDL cholesterol does not lower the risk of heart disease. In fact, it makes a lot of other situations worse.
Statin Nation talks about a study from Japan that found people with the lowest cholesterol levels were three times more likely to die of cancer than people with higher cholesterol levels. A different large-scale study from Hawaii found that people with low cholesterol were more likely to die young.
As you might expect, there is a lot of disagreement about how to use statins and whether they really do help lower blood pressure. There is no doubt that these drugs come with some risks.
Adverse Impacts of Statins
The American Journal of Cardiovascular Drugs released a paper that lists 900 studies that show statins have bad effects. One problem with statins, though, is that they don't always cause side effects right away.
People who take statin drugs may think that the drug is "doing all good" because their cholesterol levels go down, which is not what they want to happen.
As soon as the drug's side effects show up, they are usually not linked to the drug itself but to new problems that need care. This could mean taking more drugs, going through more therapy, and having even more side affects.
Some people who take statin drugs over a long period experience such things as:
- Cognitive decline
- Fatigue
- Neuropathy
- Anemia
- Acidosis
- Cataracts
- Sexual Dysfunction
In addition, other serious and sometimes life-threatening side effects have been found and include:
- Immune system suppression
- Increased risk of cancer
- Muscle tissue degeneration
- Pancreatic dysfunction
Could Tomato Juice be the Answer?
As we already said, a new study in Food Science and Nutrition found that Japanese people who were at risk of heart disease who drank tomato juice without salt had lower blood pressure and "bad" cholesterol.
"As far as we know," the study authors said, "this is the first study to look at how eating tomatoes or tomato products affects risk markers for cardiovascular disease over a year and across a wide age range."
There were 184 men and 297 women who took part in the study, and they were given endless amounts of unsalted tomato juice for a whole year. When the study was over, the blood pressure of the 94 people who had gone from not having high blood pressure to having high blood pressure dropped a lot. In this case, the high blood pressure went down from 141.2 to 137.0 mmHg, and the diastolic blood pressure went down from 83.3 to 80.9 mmHg.
What's so Great About Tomatoes?
There are many powerful bioactive compounds in tomatoes, such as carotenoids, vitamin A, calcium, and gamma-aminobutyric acid. These compounds help keep your body and mind healthy, and they may even help avoid CVD.
Lycopene is a carotene that gives fruits and vegetables their pink and red color. The color comes from tomatoes. People have looked into lycopene a lot because it may help protect against cancer and also make the heart healthier.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered that lycopene makes blood vessels work better in people who have heart disease. Blood vessel widening was 53% better in people who took 7 mg of lycopene by mouth. It was about the same as what other studies have found when 20 mg of the drug simvastatin was used.
Lycopene has also been shown in some tests to lower blood pressure. Previous research has shown that middle-aged Japanese women with high triglyceride levels who drank unsweetened tomato juice for eight weeks saw their levels drop.
How much Tomato Juice Should I Drink?
Most of the people who took part in this new study drank about 7 ounces of tomato juice without salt every day for a year. Buy organic tomato juice that isn't salted and doesn't have any other ingredients added to it. Always make sure to eat lots of bright fruits and vegetables.