Note: This episode originally aired in November 2021. Find out what Dr. Lipman and Dr. Rountree have to say about the rise of blood pressure in U.S. adults, hypertension symptoms, and how to maintain a healthy lifestyle for your heart.
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Dr. Robert Rountree:
This is the Thorne Podcast, the show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet, supplements and lifestyle approaches to good health. I'm Dr. Robert Rountree, chief medical officer at Thorne Research and functional medicine doctor.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
And I'm Dr. Frank Lipman, New York Times bestseller and functional medicine doctor. As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who expressed them and not the recommendations of Thorne Research. Statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Thorne Podcast. How are things going for you, Bob?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Pretty good, actually. We're having a little bit of a early spring year. Colorado weather is kind of the definition of schizophrenia. I mean really, it's just like one day it's 10 degrees and the next day it's 65. We've had these exceptionally warm days lately and I've been able to get out and do a little hiking. It's great to get out and get some fresh air.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
The hiking out there is gorgeous, right?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah. I love getting up in the high country, the high altitude, 10,000 feet or so.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
That's good for your hormetic effect. That's good for your-
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, for your mitochondria.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
... mitochondria, for aging.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yep, absolutely. And your lungs.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Yeah. A little bit of panting, not enough oxygen. All good for the body.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So true.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Okay, folks. Today, our main topic is going to be blood pressure. Bob, when someone comes to you with high blood pressure, how do you think about it?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It's a whole lifestyle issue, obviously. First of all, this is a huge problem in Western society. It's not just Western society. It's a worldwide problem. It's the way we live. I say that because when you go into the jungle and measure the blood pressure of "primitive tribes", it tends to be low. I think about the Tarahumara Indians down in Mexico and they run blood pressure of 90/60 their whole life.
It's getting to be the norm in civilized society for people to have higher and higher blood pressure. So when you ask, "Well, how do I think about it?" I think about it in the context of our society. It's not as much an individual problem. It's a big societal problem.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
And I'll just confirm what you're saying. When I started my training in South Africa and I went to work in the bush... When I was working in the cities and I was working at Baragwanath hospital, which is the biggest hospital in Africa... In South Africa, there was apartheid at that time. You either had to work in a Black hospital or a white hospital. Baragwanath was this huge Black hospital with urbanized Africans. High blood pressure was a major, major issue there because people had come from the country and had developed their Western lifestyle of eating all the crap and whatever. Blood pressure was a huge problem.
And then when I went to work in the bush for 18 months, blood pressure was not a problem. People who had become urbanized developed blood pressure. That's to sort of complement exactly what you were saying, because the same people who had [inaudible] rest of their families or whatever in the rural areas did not have blood pressure at all. It was not a problem at all. In the urban areas, it was a huge, huge problem.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yep. That makes the point that this isn't just some new genetic disorder that came out of nowhere, that this is a lifestyle issue. A lot of the lifestyle factors that are involved in high blood pressure are put into place early in life: too much salt, too much animal fat early in life. I'm not one of these people that says, "Well, you got to eat a low-fat diet," that that's the best way to go, but I think a lot of animal fat... Certainly, the way that I was raised in South Alabama, you put salt on your melons. I remember that. Put salt on your cantaloupe, put salt on your watermelon. Why on earth anybody would ever do that, I have no idea.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
I would say this. What I am finding that is most people, or a lot of people, are not salt sensitive. This is just happening with salt sensitive-
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Salt sensitive people.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
I actually see more of the problem is sugar. To me, the first thing I think of with high blood pressure is actually insulin resistance. My experience has been blood pressure usually is... It's very rare that people just have blood pressure alone. They usually have metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance. Blood pressure is part of that picture.
I mean yes, I do see some people who just have high blood pressure. In fact, what's interesting now is now that you can do this... I just saw a guy—an example—he eats vegetarian. I mean, really relatively healthy diet. Not that I'm saying a vegetarian diet is the only way to go as a healthy diabetes, but his diet is not one you'd think of, of causing high blood pressure. He meditates every day.
When we did his genetic testing, he was salt sensitive. And then when I went back to ask him, he says, "Yes, my wife uses a lot of salt." They're Indian. He said... uses a lot of salt in the cooking. We just switched him over to potassium chloride and sure enough, his blood pressure went down.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
That's been an ongoing debate as long as I've been in medicine which is, is the problem too much salt or not enough potassium?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Right. But he was particularly salt sensitive.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Salt sensitive.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
I don't see that that often. I mean, that was sort of, in a way, an anomaly. Most of the people that I see with high blood pressure are usually more insulin resistant.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I think what I'm saying is it's the whole shebang, right?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Gestalt, yeah.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It's everything. It's the gestalt of it. Again, where I grew up in South Alabama, they call that the Stroke Belt. They call it that because so many people have strokes at an early age. When I was in training, I used to see people with just ungodly high blood pressure, the top number over 200. I saw that on a regular basis. I thought, well, it's got to be something that they're doing, something that they're eating. I thought it was the combination. It wasn't unusual for people to take their green beans and boil them with fatback for hours. So you load it up with salt and fat and it's all of it together.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Right, and bad fat. Just to be clear that we're not saying that fat is necessarily bad.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
No, not at all. But it's the animal fat with the salt and all that stuff at a early age, and then there's also the problem with stress, which is really interesting. It's like you don't know how much stress we live in until you get out of it. You go on meditation retreat somewhere for a week where life is quiet and you don't have news that you're bombarded with all day long. I mean, if there's this tsunami in New Zealand, you know about it 15 minutes later. Because of the internet, the whole world is right there at our fingertips. That creates kind of an emotional burden, I think.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
And as you said, it's the whole gestalt of the way we live. We don't sleep enough. We're stressed out. We're not doing enough for the stress. We're more sedentary. We're not exercising. We're eating more altered fats, the vegetable oils that get altered when we [inaudible]. Everything about our lifestyle choices, all our default choices are unhealthy in the way we live today. You put that all together and why wouldn't you expect this epidemic of high blood pressure?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
And then the problem becomes... And I agree, high blood pressure is a problem and you've got to do something about it. The problem is they go to their doctor, they get told they've got high blood pressure and they get put on blood pressure medication. Which is fine. I'm not against blood pressure medication, but a lot of these lifestyle issues are not addressed.
Sometimes, people need blood pressure medication. There's no question about that. But if you don't address the lifestyle issues that are actually causing or are factors in high blood pressure, then I think that's a problem.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I totally agree. It's interesting. There are plenty of studies showing that if you get people on a regular meditation program, that you can lower their blood pressure by five, 10 points. Part of the challenge is that if you follow people over a lifetime... I've had some patients that I've followed for three, four decades. Over time, you see the blood pressure kind of creeping up.
What I tell people is, "Eventually, this may be a big problem, but let's try to delay the onset of that." And how do we delay the onset of that? It's really basic stuff. Losing weight has a huge impact. Meditating, regular exercise, all our really basic lifestyle stuff can have a huge effect that lasts for decades.
That's an important thing for people to understand, is I'm not just so worried about what's your blood pressure right now. I'm worried about how this is going to progress over time if you don't institute the proper lifestyle changes. That's what I tell my patients.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Right. I think it's important for people to realize that blood pressure is not simple, and it doesn't always respond to lifestyle. I mean, I've seen people who do all the right things. You give them the supplements, which we can talk about, and their blood pressure doesn't come down. So I think there's some complicated mechanisms, sometimes, that we just can't—well, I can't, anyway—nail down.
Sometimes, people need blood pressure medication. It's not that I'm any way, and I think you feel the same way, against medication. Because if someone's blood pressure remains elevated, I think it is important to bring it down because there are more and more studies showing, for instance, decreased cognitive abilities in people who've had high blood pressure for a long time as they get older. There are some negative consequences of something that we don't even know is there. Most people are not going to have any symptoms from high blood pressure, but it is something that should be monitored.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I think you make a really valuable point. If you don't get your blood pressure checked, you have no way of knowing whether it's high or not. People that have super high blood pressure may have symptoms like ringing in their ears, pounding in their ears. Some people may have symptoms, but most people have no way of knowing whether their blood pressure is higher or lower. They just don't know. So it's one of the reasons that I can think of that it's a good idea to get regular medical checkups.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Or get a blood pressure... You can get [crosstalk].
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Get your own cuff.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Because what I see a lot, people have white coat syndrome. I have white coat syndrome. White coat syndrome, for you folks out there listening, is when you go to the doctor, you get a little bit anxious when they take your blood pressure and your blood pressure goes up, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just the acute stress of some crazy person with a white coat taking your blood pressure.
I encourage people to actually measure it at home. It's very rare that someone's blood pressure, when they take it at home, is not lower than when it's taken in a doctor's office.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah. Totally agree. The cuffs are cheap. These days, they're generally good quality. Most of the ones that you see in your drug store, you can pretty much believe that they're not crappy quality. If there's any question at all, if there's a family history, go ahead and buy one.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
So Bob, what do you do? Someone comes in. We both agree that this is multifactorial. It has everything to do with the way we live our lives today. But the practical issue, someone comes in to you and whether they know or they don't know they have blood pressure or if they're on blood pressure medication... Actually, those are two questions. Someone's not on blood pressure medication and their blood pressure's a little bit elevated. We give them the lifestyle changes, and then are there supplements that you use a lot for high blood pressure?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Certainly. One thing I would say is, I don't know any one thing that people can take that's magic. There was one herb that I used to use a lot that I would say was close to magic and that was rauwolfia.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Which is what one of... Isn't one of those blood pressure medications actually made from that?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, it used to be. In India, you can still get rauwolfia. It was actually one of the first commercially available blood pressure drugs, was reserpine, which was made from rauwolfia which is a traditional Ayurvedic remedy. They'd been using it in India forever and then researchers got a hold of it and said, "Wait a minute. This stuff really works. What's the active ingredient?"
As often happens in medicine, as soon as you take what you think is the active ingredient out of the herb and start giving it to people, then it's more potent but has more side effects. The problem with reserpine is that it caused depression.
It was a very, very popular drug, reserpine, and then eventually it got taken off the market. I don't know if it really got taken off the market. The company stopped making it in the US and now it's basically impossible to get. But it kind of said, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe there's some herbal medicines that have potential out there."
What I use instead in my patients is a combination. I use fish oil, high doses of EPA and DHA, at least 2000 milligrams a day. I use magnesium. I prefer the magnesium glycinate, and I use garlic. Those are kind of my starters.
I also make sure people are on a good dose of methylated B vitamins, Methyl- Guard, something like that. Metal-Guard Plus that Thorne makes I think is a really good one that helps raise your nitric oxide, which is a really interesting concept.
Nitric oxide is a gas. We know that in high quantities it's toxic, but we also know that our blood vessel walls make these tiny amounts of nitric oxide. That's what allows the vessel walls to stay open. It turns out, certain foods like arugula and beets raise nitric oxide. Arginine raises nitric oxide. Citrulline raises nitric oxide. Resveratrol raises nitric oxide. So that's another set of supplements that I sometimes use, is a combination of arginine and-
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Citrulline.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, sometimes citrulline with it, which recycles that... Thorne has a product called Perfusia that's got a lot of those things in it, the resveratrol that I think is a really good supplement to try for people with high blood pressure. So yeah, raising nitric oxide, raising magnesium, thinning the blood with fish oil, those are all good strategies.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
What about bergamot? Have you ever used bergamot?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I'm just starting to use it in my practice. I've using it more for fatty liver. Have you found that it helps with hypertension?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
It's hard to say because with hypertension, I'm usually using magnesium and fish oils and a couple of things and lifestyle, losing weight or low-carb diets, et cetera. But I've been using bergamot sometimes when people have... For cholesterol or for lipid problems and for blood pressure. And then I often use CoQ10 as well.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yep, yep. There's data on CoQ10. Curcumin is another herb that I often put people on. So yeah, there are a whole lot of different nutrients.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
The way I see high blood pressure often is one of those downstream effects of all these lifestyle bad habits. That's why I love the curcumins and the CoQ10s and the fish oils because they seem to have so many downstream effects on so many different organ systems. Yes, I use all the above.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I've used that. There's articles on alpha-lipoic acid, how using alpha-lipoic acid with angiotensin receptor blockers... Which I got to say, are my favorite class of drugs for treating blood pressure. If somebody needs to be on a drug, then the ARBs, angiotensin receptor blockers, I think are the best. They have almost no side effects. I use one called telmisartan, valsartan. All the sartans, if you have to be on a drug, that's a good one. Alpha-lipoic acid is synergistic with that.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
That's interesting to know. Thank you. Thanks, Bob. That was great to hear. I didn't know that at all.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
One last thing to squeeze in is olive oil and olive leaf. People think of olive leaf as being a good immune booster, but olive leaf and olive oil are both really good for high blood pressure.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Interesting. Okay, thank you, Bob. Now, we're going to take a short break. When we get back, we'll take some questions.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
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Dr. Frank Lipman:
And we're back. Now, it's time to answer some questions from the community. Okay, Bob, our first question this week comes from a listener who asks, "Can you explain how blood pressure works? I never understand what the numbers 78 or 123 mean. How can people tell what is good or bad from just their numbers?"
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, that's a pretty straightforward thing. Basically, the heart is pumping blood into the blood vessels and you have to maintain a lower amount of pressure just so that the blood vessels don't collapse. That lower number, called the diastolic number, that's the pressure that never goes lower, whereas the upper number, the systolic, that's the surge that you get whenever the heart pumps. They both mean two different things and they both have two slightly different implications for health.
Now, the norm is considered to be 120/80. That's millimeters of mercury. If you've got a 80 millimeters of mercury as your lower number, your diastolic, then that's the tonic blood pressure that you never go lower than. That kind of reflects the overall flexibility of your arteries. If your arteries are hardened, then that lower number starts to creep up. It can go up to 90. It can go up to a hundred. That's a concern because that says, "Well, your arteries are never really relaxing."
Now, another part of the flexibility is what happens when the heart pumps. If the heart pumps and the vessels are rigid, then instead of the vessels dilating more to accommodate the big flow coming through, it's like a miniature tsunami coming through the vessels. Then instead of it just sending blood out more efficiently to the body, then the pressure just goes up. When it gets over 120, you start to get a little bit concerned.
Now some people say, "120/80, that's the norm." That's considered okay, but these Aboriginal tribes that live a very different lifestyle from us, they may run a blood pressure of 90/60. So maybe even 120/80 is higher than it should be.
But the technical definition of hypertension is when the blood pressure is consistently over 140/90. That implies that the blood vessels are rigid or that kidneys are retaining salt, that something is keeping that average blood pressure higher than normal. Again, people want to know what's good or bad. If you're running a blood pressure that's always over 140 or it's spiking up 150, 160, then something needs to be done.
Frank, what does it feel like when you have high blood pressure? Is there anything to look for?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Well, this is the problem. It doesn't feel like anything. Until your blood pressure is quite high, you can get symptoms like headaches or ringing in your ears. But most people, because their blood pressure is usually not that high—it may be high, but not that high—are asymptomatic. Early in our discussion, we're encouraging people either to go get it checked at the doctor or just get a blood pressure cuff because you don't actually have any symptoms from high blood pressure until it's very high. When it's very high, that becomes more dangerous. We don't want you to wait until you have symptoms from high blood pressure.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yep, yep. Absolutely.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
How can I lower my blood pressure immediately?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, depends on how high it is. I mean, if it's 200/120, that is kind of bordering on being a medical emergency. If it stays that way for more than a couple of hours, or if that's really unusual for the person... If it's somebody who's had longstanding hypertension and they run that kind of blood pressure, then it's a little bit less of a concern. But if a person has a normal blood pressure, 120/80, and suddenly it's spiking up, that means something's seriously wrong and they should go to the hospital and be evaluated. For somebody that's has a more minor spike, if it's 150/90, then the single best thing they could do is a good long meditation. The other thing that I have recommended and seen work is getting intravenous magnesium.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Yep, I've done it by itself.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Can be amazing. Can be amazing. It really creates this calm, mellow feeling. If you have access to a local IV center, and these places are popping up all over the country now, then you want to get at least a thousand milligrams of magnesium. Some places won't go higher than that, but I have given people three grams, 3000 milligrams of magnesium. If you've got a spike in blood pressure, then you may need three grams to do that. So why is high blood pressure called hypertension, Frank?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
It's sort of what you had just explained. You get tension in the arterial vessels and there's more pressure that's needed to pump out the blood. That's why it's hyper, high, tension in the vessels. I'm assuming that's why it's called hypertension. It's increased tension in the blood vessels causing extra tension on the heart or pressure when the heart has to pump out the blood into the vessels.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I think that's reasonable. I'm not sure when they first started using that term. I'm guessing they didn't fully understand what caused it. They just said, "Well, you must have a lot of tension in your body." I don't know. I'm just guessing that that's where that word came from originally.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Does blood pressure vary by age?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Absolutely. The older a person gets, the more they tend to have an increase in blood pressure that doesn't come down with simple relaxation. That's important because when I see somebody who's in their late twenties or thirties that starting to run higher blood pressure and they say, "It's probably nothing. I'm probably stressed," I say, "This, to me, is a big red flag. Because if you're young and your blood pressure is going up, the older you get, the more this is going to be a problem." I'm saying that not to scare the person. I'm just saying this means you need to figure out how to deal with this.
You need address it somehow. You need to make lifestyle changes, lose weight, get your blood sugar down, start regularly meditating. Sometimes I say, "Go ahead now and see somebody who does Chinese medicine," because there's some Chinese herbs that can be really effective. If a person has high blood pressure at a younger age, it kind of doesn't bode well. It means they may be dealing with that for a long time.
So, Frank, what kind of yoga is best for lowering blood pressure? Is it just stretching that helps, or is there something specific about a type of yoga?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Well, that's an interesting question because I always used to think that it was just the relaxation aspect of yoga that helped blood pressure. But there was actually a recent study that showed that stretching actually helps high blood pressure. When you think about it anatomically or physiologically, it makes sense. Because when you stretch, you're stretching the fascia, that connective tissue that holds the blood vessels and all the organs together. When you're stretching the fascia, you're stretching the blood vessels, too. You're decreasing that tension, that hypertension in the blood vessels. Stretching does help blood pressure.
I'm a big fan of restorative yoga because you stay in certain poses for a long time. It's very relaxing. Really stretches a body out.
And just an interesting point of reference here. Mr. Iyengar, who's not around anymore, who's probably one of the best known Indian gurus who brought yoga to America—everyone probably knows about Iyengar Yoga now—has in the Iyengar Center in Pune in India, they have a special cardiac clinic where doctors, for many years, have been sending cardiac patients and the hypertensive patients to Mr. Iyengar's studio in Pune for treatments. He used to treat blood pressure and cardiac problems generally with yoga.
So obviously, yoga helps. Probably because of the relaxation effect, but I think it's more than that. I mean, I just think stretching the vessels obviously has some effect, and then just improving general blood flow and organ function I'm sure has an effect, too.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yep, absolutely. Yoga is definitely something I recommend.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Here's a question for you, Bob. Why does anxiety increase blood pressure?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, in the simplest term, it's the stress chemicals. The anxiety raises stress chemicals. The adrenal glands are firing. Adrenaline is going to increase the heart rate, increase heart pumping, all of that. The stress on the heart, that's what does it. Note, there's really no question about.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
The way to understand that, folks, is that fight or flight syndrome. We know that when you're in the jungle and you see a lion or you're in a traffic jam and you get acutely hyped up, you either... It's called fight or flight. You either got to fight the lion or you got to run away. That sympathetic system that's activated by the fight or flight aspect of life raises your blood pressure, as amongst other things that Bob just talked about.
The problem is we are continually activating our sympathetic nervous system or continually activating this fight or flight response. Because it's not only that we have to run away from lions or have to deal with the news or are in traffic. We have this chronic stress which keeps stimulating that sympathetic system. There's this continual response from the sympathetic nervous system that was developed for acute situations and now has become chronic in the way we live our lives today.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I don't know about you, Frank, but I more than once have been running from a saber-toothed tiger inside my brain.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Well, I have actually almost run away from an... I mean, once in the game park-
Dr. Robert Rountree:
From an elephant.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
... in South Africa, I drove elephants. I love elephants, but so in our day, we used to drive around in the game parks. I got a little bit too close to an elephant and it started flapping its ears and [crosstalk]. Quick reverse and just... Anyway, so that was a typical fight or flight [crosstalk].
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Fight or flight. Yeah, with good reason.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Bob, we talked about this, but let's just... How do you lower your blood pressure naturally without medication?
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, I think-
Dr. Frank Lipman:
I think it's important to recap on that one.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah. So it's lifestyle first, and we talked about that. Those are pretty straightforward things. Like you said, people don't realize that carbohydrates in excess can cause insulin resistance. Diabetes and high blood pressure go really well together. Metabolic syndrome is the precursor to diabetes. Getting your blood sugar down is pretty important.
And then we talked about it being a whole list of supplements you could try. If the person's got metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes, then berberine is way up on my list. Alpha-lipoic acid's way up on my list. Certainly, magnesium for everybody. Eating a lot of potassium-rich foods, a little bit of citrus but not so much that you get the sugar. All the stuff together.
So Frank, people say they never hear about low blood pressure. What's the deal with low blood pressure?
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Well, that's a good question because I actually see a lot of people with low blood pressure. Usually, that has to do with what I call adrenal fatigue, or what's called adrenal fatigue. I mean, I hate that term but it's basically long-term stress, which I've just talked couple of minutes ago about increasing your blood pressure.
But if you develop adrenal fatigue and you sort of overworked your adrenal hormones, your blood pressure is often low. I see that quite a bit. People who come in exhausted have quite low blood pressure and are tired. They may have problems sleeping. They're cold all the time. They have a poor response to stress.
I'm recommending salt for those people. I tell people to have a quarter or even a half a teaspoon of salt in water. I use licorice a lot. Adaptogens with licorice I find extremely helpful.
But low blood pressure is much easier to treat because it's usually someone who has chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue, whatever you want to call it. We give them some adaptogens with licorice. I tell them to use some salt, meditation. It's a little bit of a different mechanism to high blood pressure, and it's usually easier to treat.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I agree. I think the main thing I'd point out is that if the person's not having symptoms with it, then they shouldn't worry. I have people that are getting an exam and I say, "Well, your blood pressure is 90/60." They go, "Oh my God, is that a problem?" Well, it means they're probably never going to have a heart attack or a stroke, for one thing.
The number one question I ask is, do you get lightheaded when you stand up quickly or when you run upstairs? If they don't feel adrenal fatigue, if they're not feeling depleted, if they feel healthy and their blood pressure's low, then I wouldn't treat it. I wouldn't do anything about it, unless they're having symptoms with it.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. Really good point. Just having low blood pressure and being asymptomatic is not... You don't do anything about it. But if you're getting a little bit dizzy when you sit up or you sit up too quickly or going up the stairs, or you have fatigue or other symptoms of adrenal fatigue, then yes it's worth treating.
Thank you for that, Bob. Once again, thank you for always... It's just so great chatting.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
You too, [inaudible].
Dr. Frank Lipman:
That's all we have for this week. And Bob, once again, I love listening to you talk about everything, but especially all things health.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
You as well, Frank. And watch out for those elephants.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Thanks for listening to the Thorne Podcast. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
If you've got a health or wellness question you'd like answered, simply follow our Instagram and shoot a message to @thorneresearch. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting thorne.com and checking out the latest news, videos and stories on Thorne's Take 5 Daily blog.
Dr. Frank Lipman:
Once again, thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to join us next time for another episode of the Thorne Podcast.
