A Drink Skews Blood Pressure Readings

A recent study published in the American Journal of Hypertension introduces a new twist to the blood pressure dilemma.

You may actually not have high blood pressure.
Even if your doctor says so.

It may actually be that you just happened to drink this drink a few hours before your doctor’s office visit.

So, you may be suffering the side effects of blood pressure medications, or worrying about your blood pressure, for nothing.

The Western University and Lawson Health Research Institute researchers asked 13 people with normal blood pressure to abstain from caffeine-containing products for a week.

In the following three weeks, they gave them two 300 ml cups of black coffee (week 1), the maximum recommended dose of a common calcium channel blocker blood pressure treatment (felodipine) (week 2), and the coffee together with the felodipine (week 3).

From this, they drew the following conclusions:

1. After two days of no caffeine consumption, caffeine clears from your bloodstream, resulting in a higher blood pressure spike when next you consume it. Blood pressure then remains raised for hours.

2. In the presence of caffeine, calcium channel blockers cannot decrease blood pressure as well as in its absence, probably because caffeine interferes with the ability of the drug to relax and widen blood vessels.

The first conclusion increases the likelihood that your doctor will diagnose you as suffering from hypertension when your blood pressure is actually normal. So, if you only occasionally drink caffeine drinks, avoid them hours before your doctor’s visit.

Second, if you want to treat your blood pressure with drugs, you’ll need sky-high doses if you occasionally consume caffeine.

For those who control their blood pressure via natural dietary and lifestyle methods (which we, of course, recommend), it arguably means that natural methods will fail to keep your blood pressure normal for a few hours after caffeine intake.

The good news is that this study applies only to occasional consumers.

Researchers have long understood that caffeine spikes blood pressure, but they have also repeatedly concluded that regular consumption increases your tolerance of its effects, meaning that caffeine does not increase blood pressure in regular caffeine consumers.

This leaves you with two options: either drink one or two caffeinated drinks daily or leave it alone completely.

But if your high blood pressure is real, you should do these three exercises, guaranteed to drop your blood pressure below 120/80 – as soon as today…