High blood pressure, or hypertension, is by far the most common form of cardiovascular disease in the U.S. More than 90% of Americans can expect to develop it in their lifetime. While most people are treated primarily with drugs, these drugs do not come close to eliminating all the cardiovascular ills associated with our society’s high-salt, high calorie-dense diet and sedentary way of living.
Most people can get their blood pressure down – and keep it down – without the need for drugs by following the Pritikin Program.
What’s more, drug treatment frequently has annoying and sometimes dangerous side effects, and never cures the disease. All too frequently, blood pressure problems grow. Eventually, a large percentage of people end up with resistant hypertension, which means they cannot get their blood pressure below the hypertensive range even though they are on three or more anti-hypertensive drugs.
When not controlled, hypertension is a major risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, cardiac arrhythmia, and premature death.
Most people can get their blood pressure down – and keep it down – without the need for drugs by following the Pritikin Program. Those who still need medications usually require a lower dose and/or fewer drugs, thereby reducing their risk of suffering adverse side effects from the medications.
For more than three decades, the Pritikin Program has offered a safer and more effective alternative to pharmacological therapy because the program eliminates the dietary insults and other lifestyle-related factors that caused hypertension to develop in the first place.
Results of the Pritikin Program in controlling high blood pressure
Results published as early as 1983 showed that after just one month of adopting the Pritikin Program, 83% of patients with hypertension were able to discontinue their medication and attain blood pressures as low or lower than their pre-Pritikin levels on anti-hypertensive drugs.
Since then, several other studies, including one published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation in 2002, have documented that people who entered the Pritikin Longevity Center with high blood pressure ended their three-week stay with normal blood pressure. The majority left the Center free of all hypertension medications.
In 2005, a meta-analysis of 1,117 hypertensives who came to Pritikin reported that systolic blood pressure fell on average 9%. Diastolic pressure fell 9%. Of those on blood pressure drugs, 55% returned home free of their drugs, their blood pressures in the normal range. Many of the remaining 45% left Pritikin with their dosages substantially reduced.
Studies have also found that the Pritikin Program increases the body’s production of nitric oxide. a beneficial chemical that relaxes smooth muscle cells in the artery wall, decreasing peripheral resistance and lowering blood pressure.
Bottom Line
The Pritikin Longevity Center may be your best assurance that you can start life anew – healthy, strong, free of soaring blood pressure numbers, and quite possibly, free for the rest of your life of the crippling strokes and heart problems that so often disable those with high blood pressure.