A daily dose of chocolate may lower high blood pressure just as well as beta-blockers or ACE inhibitors to keep your blood pressure under control.
And without the side effects common with beta blockers.
Some of you chocolate lovers have intuitively suspected for a long time that chocolate has curative powers. And the evidence is building that it may lower high blood pressure more than anyone could have imagined.
An analysis of several studies using cocoa products done at Cologne, Germany's University Hospital found that eating chocolate each day improved systolic blood pressure an average of 4.7 mm Hg, and diastolic 2.8 mm Hg when compared with control patients who ate no chocolate.
A total of five studies using various types of chocolate were analyzed. Participants in three of the studies were given either 100 grams of dark chocolate a day, containing 500 milligrams polyphenols, or the same amount of cocoa- and polyphenol-free white chocolate.
One study to lower high blood pressure used a dark chocolate high in flavonoids using a low-flavanoid chocolate as the control. The fifth study used milk chocolate high in flavanols and procyanidins with controls eating cocoa butter chocolate containing few flavanols (less than 5 milligrams).
If the general population ate chocolate each day, improvements in health would be substantial, said Dirk Taubert, M.D., Ph.D. of University Hospital. Chocolate could reduce the risk of stroke (by about 20 percent), coronary heart disease (by 10 percent) and all-cause mortality (by 8 percent).
Taubert and his colleagues said that daily chocolate “rationally applied†could be part of a program to lower the risk of hypertension that can have results equal to taking beta-blockers or ACE inhibitors, drugs commonly used to lower high blood pressure.
Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has spent years studying the effects of routine cocoa drinking on the Kuna people of Panama. The Kuna, who drink up to 40 cups of cocoa a week, have a less than 10 percent risk of stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes.
Hollenberg believes that epicatechin should be considered a vitamin, and other nutrition experts believe that epicatechin is so important that it could even warrant a rethinking of how vitamins are defined.
The list of conditions that are found related to magnesium deficiency contains over 3,500 medical referencesis and is involved in over 325 biochemical reactions in your body! Here's what can happen if you are deficient:
Left untreated, a magnesium deficiency can lead to many life-threatening conditions such as hgh blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis.
The health benefits of magnesium are mostly ignored because it is not a drug, even though it is MORE powerful than drugs in many cases. That's why it is used in the hospital for life-threatening and emergency situations like seizures and heart failure.
"Dr. Al says, "Magnesium is your body's natural blood vessel relaxer. I've used it in my practice with great results.
It helps balance potassium, sodium and calcium, which all affect blood pressure."
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