I Need Help Lowering My Blood Pressure. Any Tips?

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Columbia engineered for whatever I need help lowering my blood pressure. This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of Famer authority. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Donna B. Cruze from Instagram says help. I need help lowering my blood pressure. First off. Hey, hey, hey, Donna. Donna is a longtime pal from Santa Cruz and big supporter of the Virgin diet. And Donna, I am super excited to help you with this. I'll be right back with the answer. Stay with me.

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So there are a lot of things that you can do to help support a healthy blood pressure level. So let's just walk through them. The first diet that's the very best for this is the Sugar impact diet. You want to have really good blood sugar control and you want to be what's called insulin sensitive. If you're eating a lot of carbs, you're driving up blood sugar and you're driving up insulin and keeping insulin up higher than it should be, which is probably somewhere more in the 2 to 5 range. And this is a number you really should get tested with your doctor. When you get your blood sugar tested, also test your fasting insulin. If it's higher, it can also start to wreak havoc with your blood pressure and create inflammation. So that's the first thing. And so the Sugar Impact diet is really built to help with improving insulin sensitivity and also improving blood sugar. Now, one of the things that can drive up blood sugar is fructose. So I'm not talking about eating one or two pieces of fruit a day, especially things like berries, but I'm talking about fruit juice, dried fruit, jam. To me, I look at fruit juice is soda, dried fruit is candy and jam, and these syrups is syrup. So lose those and make sure you're not getting anything in like agave that has a lot of fructose in it. So that's the next thing, foods that can really help here, olive oil, 2 tablespoons of olive oil a day. And I'm talking the good quality extra virgin olive oil. Shout out to my buddies over there at the Fresh Pest olive oil. Make sure you're getting high quality, real olive oil, super important. But that can help support healthy blood pressure levels too. In fact, there's studies that show that olive oil can help lower blood pressure. And you know, the cool thing about foods and supplements versus medications is they'll normalize things, but they're not going to drive it lower than it should be. So olive oil, super important here. Eating a diet that is like minimally processed, unprocess your diet and make sure you're eating protein, fat and fiber. That trifecta of good healthy fats, things like avocado, olive oil, wild fish, along with fiber from slow low carbs and non starchy vegetables. And then clean protein again, that keeps your blood sugar stable too. Supplements that are important here. One of the biggies, magnesium. Super important. Now we can take an Epsom salts bath. That's helpful. But you'll probably want to supplement with extra magnesium as well. I know that's one of the key things that I take and I find most people need a little extra magnesium. You want to take a good quality magnesium. Generally a bisglycinate chelate is a great way to go it because they're hard to absorb. So that's one. Another supplement that can be amazing. Here is something called annatto E. Annattotokotrienols. It's a very specific form of vitamin E called atcotrienol that is great for heart health. So there's another one. And then exercise. Really important to get in daily exercise. And I like to rotate between some high intensity interval training, some walking, some resistance training, exercise. Super key here. Sleep. Another one, of course, just one poor night of sleep, you're more insulin resistant, which will create problems. So sleep is important. And then finally doing something that helps with relaxation. Now I know that you've got your cute little doggie there, Donna, so you can be out walking, but make sure you're doing the other exercise too. And then do something great for stress that might be doing some deep breathing. That's what I've been doing lately. I've been doing this focused breathing exercise that one of my doctor pals turned me onto. Meditation is another one that can work. Tapping. So Ziva, meditation with my pal Emily Fletcher. Tapping with Nick Ortner. So find the thing that works really well for you. Make sure you add it in. And as you can see from this answer, it ain't just one thing, right? When you look at how to support healthy blood pressure levels, you want to look at everything that can help contribute. Here's what's awesome about that. The same things that are going to contribute to good blood pressure levels are going to contribute to good blood sugar levels, are going to contribute to good energy, are going to contribute to anti aging and to weight loss. And one other thing that I would throw in here is start to look at intermittent fasting. And I have done a lot, a lot, a lot of episodes on intermittent fasting. So check out that info too, because that can help you as well. All right, Donna, report in. I want to hear how it goes. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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