This Common Nutrient Spikes High Blood Pressure If You Exercise

In May 2016, a team from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center published an alarming article in the American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.

If you have high blood pressure, you have probably been told that you should exercise to combat it.

A new study now shows that this might be very dangerous advice if you consume too much of a certain nutrient in your diet.

Before understanding how this works, we need a brief crash course into one of the mechanisms by which your body increases and decreases its blood pressure.

Your autonomic nervous system is the part of your nervous system that regulates your unconscious actions. It consists of two parts, sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves.

Your sympathetic nerves stimulate your flight and fight responses, like an elevation in blood pressure, acceleration in heart rate, and dilation of lungs.

Your parasympathetic nerves are responsible for bodily responses that occur when you are at rest, such as sexual arousal, digestion, and urination.

If your sympathetic nerves are too active, you will have high blood pressure. This is normal while you exercise, but it is a form of cardiovascular disease if these nerves are permanently overactive.

It’s a well-established fact that phosphate increased blood pressure. This made them wonder whether phosphates in salt did so by increasing sympathetic nerve activity.

They separated their rat subjects into a group that received high phosphate diet and one given a normal diet. The high phosphate diet contained double the amount recommended for rats of their age.

The researchers then stimulated the rats’ muscles to mimic exercise.

This study proved their suspicion right. Not only did the rats on the high phosphate diet have higher blood pressure while at rest, but also much higher blood pressure and sympathetic nerve activity than their peers during exercise.

Extremely high sympathetic nerve activity during exercise can cause an unhealthy thickening of arterial walls, heart attack, and stroke.

This means that exercise may be dangerous for people who already have high blood pressure and who consume too much phosphate.

The excess in phosphates may tip their sympathetic nervous system activity from normal to dangerously high during exercise. This might even explain why some people (including extremely fit ones) die while training.

The USDA recommends that adults consume at least 700 milligrams of phosphate per day, as it is essential for healthy skin, bones, teeth, and hair. It is abundant in meat, milk, eggs, tuna, white beans, almonds, sunflower seeds, and brown rice.

This is not usually where an overdose comes from, however. Packaged products normally include it as flavor enhancer or preservative. Because the Western diet contains so much packaged food, most people consume way too much phosphate.

It is almost always added to bread, rolls, processed cheese, processed meat (like ham and sausage), canned fish, ice cream, sauces, marinades, and sodas.

The scientists recommend that phosphate, like sodium, should appear on food labels. Until then, your best option is either to avoid packaged and prebaked products, or to avoid meat, milk, and other phosphate-rich foods. The former option is by far the better.

But here is a set of blood pressure exercises that actually relax the sympathetic system and activate the parasympathetic nerve system. Therefore, dropping your blood pressure below 120/80 – starting today…