Dr Eric Berg has revealed a simple home remedy to bust your high blood pressure levels. “It’s very, very cheap. In fact, it’ll cost you nothing,” the doctor said on his YouTube channel.
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is the precursor to serious health problems, including heart attacks and strokes. Therefore, it’s crucial to keep your reading in check.
According to Blood Pressure UK, around one in three adults in the UK suffer from high blood pressure. Worryingly, the charity adds that there are more than five million people that are undiagnosed in England alone.
While cutting back on your salt intake is one of the best-known ways to keep hypertension in check, Dr Berg warned that a low-salt diet could actually “worsen” your blood pressure. Instead, he recommended “a very simple thing” you can do right now.
The doctor’s tip for lowering your blood pressure isn’t diet- or even exercise-related. All you need is your breath. “Just try it out, it will work,” he said.
Dr Berg recommended a technique called paced breathing to “significantly” lower your blood pressure reading.
He explained that the frequency of six breaths per minute is synchronised with baroreceptors – receptors in your arteries that are connected to the nervous system – in a way that is going to bring your blood pressure down.
The doctor said: “This method of breathing is going to significantly reduce your blood pressure, especially in people with cardiac heart failure. It has the ability to increase oxygen saturation, to increase exercise tolerance.
“On top of all that, it’s one of the best things to decrease the sympathetic nervous system – the fight or flight dominance that so many people have. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s something anyone can do.”
To do paced breathing, you just need to slow down your breaths to six breaths per minute.
He noted that people with hypertension, especially if they have diabetes or they are overweight, are not breathing at six breaths per minute. “They are breathing pretty rapidly,” the doctor said.
While you don’t need to do paced breathing constantly, the doctor recommended finding a time each day to practice this method.
He recommended breathing through your chest and slowing down to get it right.
Dr Berg said: “You don’t want to strain or do it with a lot of effort because you are going to activate the sympathetic nervous system.
“You want to slowly just breathe through your nose… into your chest.
“It’s a five-second inhalation slowly and then a five-second exhalation. So that’s how you do it.
“That will give you six complete breathing cycles per minute, which will synchronise to this baroreceptor, start affecting your autonomic nervous system, bring your pressure down, your pulse rate will come down and you will feel very calm.”
