Reversing High Blood Pressure in 2 Weeks!
How I Reversed a 71-year-old diabetic’s high blood pressure so quickly
Hypertension affects more than 30% of adults worldwide, 1.28 billion aged 30-79.
Nearly 50% of adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure, ~116 million people.
46% of adults with hypertension are unaware they have it.
Only 42% are diagnosed and treated.
High blood pressure is a major cause of premature death worldwide.
My Birthday, the Gift of Life
I just turned 55 today!
When I was hospitalized at 14 and unable to move due to an autoimmune disease, I thought that if I lived to 40, that would be a long time. I am grateful for the many years I've spent on this amazing planet with so many amazing people, and for a lifetime of both deeply hard trials and heavenly joys.
Since I discovered that my heart arteries were clogged with plaques, the greatest being a 77% blockage, I feel blessed to know this fact. Otherwise, I would have assumed I was healthy. Since then, I've radically changed my lifestyle to heal my disease. I've had the great blessing of gaining some medical knowledge, being educated and trained as a medical doctor, and for the past two decades, learning about food and nutrition, exercise physiology, and health.
I thank the Lord for all, my family and friends, my work colleagues and all those I have had the great pleasure of crossing paths with in this vast universe. And to all of you who may be reading my thoughts right now — thank you so much.
Once I understood how to reverse my own clogged arteries, having seen evidence in a short span of three months, I started to think of who else I could help that would also be in jeopardy of a heart attack.
Rapid Reversal of Disease Is Possible
If a bone fracture can heal in a few months, why can’t most diseases, which are just fractures of a bodily system?
Dr. Kevin Ham
How long do you think it would take to reverse diabetes?
How about high blood pressure?
High cholesterol?
Obesity?
Compared to reversing clogged heart arteries, I thought the above were 'easy' and 'theoretically' possible within a month, knowing full well that it typically takes years to decades to develop.
But each of these diseases and symptoms is quite common nowadays. A century ago, they were rare. Dr. William Osler, a prominent physician who practiced in Toronto, Washington and London, had not seen a heart attack during his lifetime. The first published case of a heart attack in the US was reported by Dr. James Herrick in 1912.
I thought of many people. Fred was top of mind. He is a family church friend I have known for over 50 years, and I knew he had diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and was overweight. He also had the risk factor of age, being 71 years old. I had seen so many friends have heart attacks in their 60s and 70s, and some perished as a result. I felt a strong responsibility to see if I could help Fred. He had a high likelihood of a heart attack or major health event within the next three to five years, imho.
So I asked him if he was willing to try to reverse his diabetes. In theory, I believed I could help him reverse his diabetes as quickly as one week if I went to the theorized extreme, but natural measures. I felt very confident that with a simpler reverse protocol for diabetes, his disease would reverse within two months and certainly under three months.
I had already had my own personal experience of reducing my high LDL cholesterol by 50% in just five weeks. So reducing his cholesterol, I figured, was a given.
What I was uncertain about was how long it would take to reduce his blood pressure.
A Decade of Disease Gone in 2 Weeks?
A miracle is when life returns. A greater miracle is when it happens suddenly.
Dr. Kevin Ham
Fred has had diabetes, associated high blood pressure and high cholesterol for over six years. His diseases progressed, and what started as one medication has grown to six medications:
2 for diabetes
2 for high blood pressure
1 for high LDL cholesterol
I wanted to ensure that Fred's mindset was ready to undergo a lifestyle change involving a targeted diet and exercise. Simple in principle, but unless his mindset was determined, it would not work in execution. It's not that we don't know what we should do; it's more that we don't act on what we know deep inside. We often avoid, ignore, or even run away from what our body is telling us.
I told him that the first week would be the hardest and that the rest of the first month would get easier, but would still be challenging. Reversing his diseases would require targeted therapy. I gave him an example of a very tough disease to treat: cancer. We take that very seriously, and people undergo chemotherapy that sometimes makes hair fall out, and the treatment itself can be quite toxic. We do surgery and Radiation, which is a significant risk factor itself for cancer. But we want to eradicate every last cancer cell, so we go to extremes. In comparison, the reversal protocol would be much easier and faster, but still needed to be very targeted to eliminate the root causes of his diseases.
I said that the hardest thing would be his mindset and his decision to become healthy.
Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity are when one's metabolism has been backed up like a traffic jam on a highway, which eventually starts overflowing into the smaller side streets. The traffic continues to pile up without proper outlets. The organs get overloaded with stored energy in the form of glycogen and fat.
Once the jams or blockages are cleared, then traffic can start moving and repairing the downstream effects of the clog. I like to refer to these as the CONSTRAINTS. You might call it the biggest Bottlenecks, where flow is blocked and backs up everything else.
The question for each of these conditions is:
What is the Constraint or Big Bottleneck that must be cleared?
The Bottleneck (Constraint) in High Blood Pressure
The highways of life twist and turn to deliver life and take away the waste.
Dr. Kevin Ham
I didn't want to tackle Fred's blood pressure first. I wanted to tackle possible clogged arteries, which would be a risk factor for heart attack and stroke. Diabetes and high blood pressure are significant risk factors for this, but since I knew how to lower his risk of heart attack and high LDL cholesterol, I thought we should tackle that first before turning to his diabetes and high blood pressure.
I already knew the answer for diabetes because many doctors have shown that even severe diabetes can be reversed in as little as a week, sometimes a month or two and certainly within six months.
With high blood pressure, I was seeing firsthand how difficult it was for my 90-year-old father to come down from a crazy high 220/120 bp. He got as low as 165/80 naturally, but then started adding salt to his water after watching a YouTube video that said it would make him healthier.
Researching my last newsletter on Nitric Oxide—the gas that expands blood vessels to relax—I began to understand that this chemical compound was so fundamental to the health of blood vessels and would naturally help alleviate the problem of high blood pressure.
That resolved one of the constraints. The other was the calcified plaque in the walls of the vessels, which makes it harder for the blood vessels to dilate fully. I already knew how to do this with my reversing plaque protocol. But I figured it would take 3-6 months for Fred.
Since we already know how to revive the endothelial cells of our blood vessels so that they can once again produce a lot of nitric oxide and also support it by chewing leafy greens, I knew it would just be a matter of time for Fred's blood pressure to decline, but what I was astonished by is just how fast this worked. So fast in fact, that I was caught off guard when Fred's blood pressure crashed to a dangerous low level on day 10 of my reversal protocol.
Since we were monitoring blood glucose with a continuous glucose monitor and I assumed it would take 3 months to correct his high blood pressure, I only found out about his low blood pressure on day 12, when he said he was feeling dizzy and light-headed for two days. He said his bp was low. I asked how low.
72/45 yesterday and today.
Are you sure? That is too low. There must be something wrong with your bp machine. Let's go check. He showed me his daily bp readings.
Could it be? This was a potential emergency. His low BP could cause a heart attack if he had significant blockages, like me, since it was too sudden a drop.
I told him to:
Hold and stop his two blood pressure medications.
Drink double the amount of water and
Add a pinch of mineral salt to it to raise his blood volume.
I called him the next morning. His bp was still too low. 73/43!
I told him to add more salt to his water. By 4:30 p.m., his blood pressure had risen. 87/52. Better.
I then told him to stop taking his combo bp/diabetes medication until his bp got up to 100/70.
Despite being off all of his bp meds, his bp is still too low.
How is this possible, I thought?
What is happening in his body that it's normalized so quickly? I had not been taught that this was possible.
Just like my doctor friends said, it was impossible to reverse coronary plaque.
Could years of high blood pressure reverse in just ten days and 3 bp meds be discontinued and instead of high bp, be too low?
This was so interesting and amazing and I started to think about what was happening.
His diabetic medication that stimulated his pancreas to release insulin, regardless of glucose level, could be preventing a major strategy of the reverse protocol.
Normally, when glucose levels rise in the blood, the pancreas releases insulin to store the glucose as glycogen or fat in the liver, pancreas, muscles, and tissues.
When glucose levels are high, insulin levels also increase. This prevents stored glycogen or fat from breaking down and being used by your body, even when glucose levels are low.
So, this diabetic medication that stimulates the pancreas to release insulin twice a day is like a traffic cop that stops the cars from moving, even if the highway is clear.
While this diabetic drug can lower glucose, I thought from first principles that the benefit from breaking down stored glycogen and stored fat would be so much greater than just trying to lower glucose levels in the blood.
By lowering insulin, it opened the floodgates for the body's normal metabolism to start healing rapidly. As insulin decreased, it allowed the body to function properly, and the other blood pressure medications were now too strong, as the 'traffic cop' that held up insulin, which blocked the metabolism of stored fat and energy, was removed. Sodium was now flowing more freely out of the kidneys, and fat and glycogen were being broken down, further lowering insulin levels, which were then utilized for energy.
3 Meals a Day: Two are with Targeted Foods
Do we live to eat or eat to live? is a profound question we must ponder every time we put something in our mouth.
Dr. Kevin Ham
I had told Fred that he would eat three meals a day within an eight-hour period. That left 16 hours for his body to rest metabolically, storing energy, and then use the excess energy it had stored.
Two of his meals were going to be foods that were targeted to healing his endothelium, reversing cholesterol out of his tissues back to his liver, which can make all the cholesterol his body and cells need independent of dietary cholesterol, and to restore his metabolic hormones like insulin, glucagon etc and the organs that produce and store fat and energy like his liver and pancreas.
His third meal was going to be his fat: the fat stored in his liver, his pancreas, and his adipose tissues. The organ fat, also known as visceral fat, causes the most harm, as it prevents the organs from functioning properly. A fatty liver. A fatty pancreas. A fatty abdomen. The fat that is visible on the outside is also part of that third meal. Our goal is to reduce visceral fat so that the metabolic organs can function healthily.
Do you know how much energy this fat contains? I asked him.
When I ride my bike from Vancouver to Whistler, 122 km (70 miles) up hills and mountains (2000m), I burn 3000 kilocalories. A pound of fat has about 3500 kcal of energy. Therefore, a person with 30 pounds of fat has approximately 100,000 kcal of stored energy. Think of it like atomic energy in one atom.
And the energy from fat produces 2-3x more energy than glucose. I like to think of fat as electric energy and glucose as gas energy. Our bodies are like a hybrid engine but most people only use glucose for energy.
I asked Fred, "Are you willing to do this for the next month and even for the next 3 months? After healing and reversal, I have a sustained diet that is easier than the reversal diet." A cancer patient isn't given chemotherapy, surgery and Radiation after a cure. But they should eat well to prevent the conditions that gave rise to that first cancer cell and make their immune system strong to prevent and kill any future cancer cells.
Healing Blood Vessels
Do we live to eat or eat to live? is a profound question we must ponder every time we put something in our mouth.
Dr. Kevin Ham
Fred's blood pressure, off 2.5 blood pressure medications and off 1.5 diabetic medications (one of these meds treats both diabetes and blood pressure), is still low at 114/61, even with increased hydration.
It demonstrates that the body has remarkable resilience and healing power when the major bottlenecks are removed.
Like a fractured leg that is walked on doesn't heal, blood vessels, damaged livers, and pancreas do not heal properly if you continue eating the foods that harm them. You must cast them off to allow the body to heal.
Then, like a fractured leg that heals in 6 to 10 weeks, your fractured blood vessels and organs can heal.
It's that simple. The body rejuvenates. We know this as every cell rejuvenates and recycles. Your health can be restored as it does. And when your body is damaged, your entire body tries to heal that damage. However, if the bottleneck worsens and the traffic continues to back up, the body has a tough time keeping up with the damage and cannot repair it.
We call this damage' inflammation' or 'oxidative damage'. This creates metabolic dysfunction, meaning that food cannot be converted into energy efficiently and hormones become imbalanced. Blood vessels are no longer dilating and expanding to accommodate increased blood flow. So more pressure is needed to push blood through the tighter openings of the arteries. And the damage is typically greatest where there are intersections, which are where the arteries branch and divide. These are called bifurcations. This is where many of my heart blockages are, especially my 77% blockage, right at the opening of the first diagonal branch of my left coronary artery.
Reversal Protocol for Blood Pressure
Just like you need to enter the numbers on a doorpad in the right order to unlock, you need to do right things in the right order to reverse disease.
Dr. Kevin Ham
The overlap between my heart plaque reversal protocol and the blood pressure management protocol is significant because they share very similar root causes.
So my reversal protocol for high blood pressure is straightforward because it is simply just three things.
Cast the damaged area from anything that can damage it further.
Protect the damaged area from all foods, toxins, and inflammation.
Foods made with oils, especially heated oils
Foods with high glycemic index and load
Give your body (specifically, your blood) the targeted nutrients it needs to deliver these essential nutrients, helping to heal your damaged areas more effectively and efficiently.
Repair endothelial cells and increase nitric oxide.
Focus on multiple pathways to achieve this, such as targeted combination therapy, especially those focused on relieving the most significant bottlenecks. My reverse protocol focuses on the top three:
Diet #1 (I believe this to be the biggest factor--up to 80%)
Food targeted at healing the blood vessel endothelium
Exercise #2 (I believe this to be ~10%)
Rest #3 - For metabolic diseases like diabetes, rest means abstaining from eating, also known as fasting. I believe this to be 15%.
Sleep #4 - Some might consider this a subset of rest. I am weak in this area, and I am thinking the first principles of sleep as my fourth strategy for healing.
Genetics #5 - It's challenging to make significant changes to genetics. Still, since epigenetics is the expression of the genetic code, which is influenced by mindset and environment, there are some minor gains to be had through lifestyle.
Drugs vs Lifestyle
Let’s compare how drugs treat blood pressure and how well it lowers blood pressure vs foods, exercise and rest.
Blood Pressure Reversal Principles
General principles for blood pressure.
Lower insulin which means lower glucose levels.
Cut back on refined sugars.
This is sugar,
White flour, any desserts, pasta, breads made with white flour.
White rice (most don’t know this is refined sugars).
Foods that have high glycemic index should be eaten with caution and if you must eat them, to be at the end of your meal.
I believe 100% whole grain, especially fermented or soaked whole grain like sourdough bread and pasta is ok. Fred eats lots of whole grains still.
If I was focused on healing his diabetes faster, I would reduce some of his whole grains, but macros are not the driving bottleneck for metabolic disease. It’s more the quality of the foods and how it is eaten. Eg. chewed vs duration of feeding period vs lack of certain micronutrients, which is the problem of processed foods, where you eventually become deficient in some or many macro nutrients which are essential for metabolism.
Heal the inner lining of your blood vessels (endothelium) so they can expand
Increase nitric oxide by chewing leafy greens in all your meals.
Eat fruit and foods that protect your endothelial cells from damage. Eg. pomegranate, beets, berries (all types - organic), natto, all kinds of beans, apples
Get more blood flowing through all your blood vessels = exercise. Get your heart rate up to 80% of your max heart rate. Eg. 220 - your age. For Fred, that is 220-71 = 149 beats per minute. Walking up a hill will get you there. Highly advise 20-30 minute post meal exercise.
Let your glucose metabolism rest by limiting food to a smaller window.
This is called intermittent fasting. Eg. eat meals in 8 hour window leaves 16 hour rest or fast
If you have some or too many fat stores, then consider one of your meals to be your own body fat, and allow your body to break down this stored glycogen and fat into ‘fat energy’ called ketones. This will happen more if you have a longer intermittent fasting window.
Reflection
Just like you need to enter the numbers on a doorpad in the right order to unlock, you need to do right things in the right order to reverse disease.
Dr. Kevin Ham
How much suffering and disease can be cured and prevented so simply, so profoundly and so amazingly!
I am shocked, delighted and hopeful for so many who suffer from disease.
Life-Changing Question
Do you eat to live or live to eat?
I used to eat to live. Taste and experience were very important to me. While I still love tasty food, I now live to eat and eat for health.
I wanted to do a newsletter on Reversing Diabetes but I think I wish to speak about the Power of the Mind next.
Next week—
The Power of the Mind
How placebo and nocebo are very real in health and in business.
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