Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
Are you on a blood pressure medication? You know better than to skip a dose, but sometimes you wonder if there’s a better way to lower and control your blood pressure than through meds. For instance, could you fast to reduce your blood pressure?
Fasting has been proven to lower blood pressure, especially systolic blood pressure, according to several studies. However, if your high blood pressure has caused heart issues, you must make sure to maintain your electrolytes on your fast to avoid heart arrhythmias.
In this article, we’ll discuss the health risks associated with high blood pressure and take a deeper dive into why intermittent fasting is a natural, medication-free method you can use for lowering your blood pressure and keeping it there. You’re not going to want to miss it!
The Importance of Maintaining Blood Pressure
Your blood pressure is a reading of how much pressure your blood puts on the blood vessel walls as that blood circulates. In other words, it’s a key measure of your health, especially that of your body’s most important organ, the heart.
A good blood pressure reading should be about 120/80 mmHG, or millimeter of mercury. The 120 is your systolic blood pressure and the 80 is your diastolic blood pressure. Systolic pressure is a gauge of how much pressure is applied to the arteries each time your heart muscles contract. Diastolic pressure is the level of blood pressure that occurs in the space between every heartbeat.
If your blood pressure increases to 129/89, it’s already considered elevated. Should your blood pressure reach 130/80 or 139/89, you have high blood pressure or hypertension, but only stage 1.
A reading of 140/90 or higher indicates hypertension stage 2. If your blood pressure gets too much higher than that, such as 180/120, you’re in a hypertensive crisis, which could most definitely be life-threatening. You should get immediate medical attention.
Let’s rewind a moment and discuss hypertension or high blood pressure. Hypertension often has a slow onset. What can make it even trickier to detect is lots of people with high blood pressure are asymptomatic. For those who do experience symptoms, these are not exactly significant. Hypertension patients may have more nosebleeds than average, experience difficulty breathing from time to time, and get headaches.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take hypertension seriously. At stage 1, your high blood pressure is referred to as essential or primary hypertension. This doesn’t always have an underlying cause.
This isn’t the case with secondary hypertension, or stage 2. You likely have an underlying condition if your high blood pressure has progressed to this point. Those conditions can include congenital blood vessel defects, thyroid issues, tumors in the adrenal gland, kidney conditions, and obstructive sleep apnea.
Abusing amphetamines and/or cocaine can cause stage 2 hypertension, as can long-term use of some decongestants, cold medications, and birth control pills.
If you’re diagnosed with either primary or secondary hypertension, controlling your blood pressure is of imminent concern. Those with unchecked high blood pressure, especially stage 2, could develop a slew of life-threatening conditions. Here’s an overview of those conditions.
Dementia and Other Memory Loss
Since your arteries are so blocked up from your hypertension, that can sometimes restrict the flow of blood to the brain. This puts you at a higher risk of stroke, which could lead to the onset of vascular dementia. Even without stroke, having high blood pressure could cause vascular dementia.
You may notice that you struggle to learn new things, remember, and think, which is also tied to your hypertension even if it’s not quite dementia.
Metabolic Syndrome
If you’re diagnosed with high blood pressure and you also have increased insulin, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and you’re overweight, then you have metabolic syndrome. This isn’t one condition but rather a collection of them.
Since your health is in such poor shape if you live with metabolic syndrome, you’re more likely to develop diabetes, and you could also have stroke and heart disease.
Eye Blood Vessel Damage
The fragile blood vessels in your eyes can be impacted by your high blood pressure. These vessels might tear, narrow, or become too thick, all which can cause vision loss, sometimes permanently.
Kidney Blood Vessel Damage
Your kidneys are also prone to damage as the blood vessels here either constrict or weaken due to your high blood pressure. Your kidneys may lose functionality and eventually fail altogether, creating another health crisis.
Heart Failure
As your blood pressure numbers crept up and up, your heart has had to put more work in to keep doing the same thing it’s always done, pump blood. The pumping chamber walls can eventually become thicker from the overtime, leading to what’s called left ventricular hypertrophy. If the walls continue thickening from there, you could have heart failure.
Aneurysm
An aneurysm is an artery that first weakens and then inflates like a balloon. The most common sites for aneurysms are the spleen, intestine, the knee (especially the back), the brain, and the aorta in the heart.
Should the inflated artery happen to explode, which is known as a ruptured aneurysm, the internal bleeding that results can cause a stroke and other fatal health effects.
Heart Attack
Atherosclerosis, or the abovementioned artery thickening in the heart, not only puts you at a higher risk of heart failure but heart attack as well.
Does Fasting Lower Blood Pressure?
Now that we’ve discussed why managing one’s blood pressure is so crucial, let’s talk about what fasting could do for your hypertension.
First, as a caveat, we’d only recommend fasting and other holistic methods if you have stage 1 hypertension, which is manageable and much less life-threatening. You may not even need medication at this point, so you’re exploring your other treatment options.
One treatment for high blood pressure that involves no medication is to control your diet. Sodium-heavy foods are the biggest dietary culprits in causing blood pressure to skyrocket, so by cutting these out, your blood pressure could come down.
On an intermittent fasting diet, where you have both fasting and eating windows, you’re already eating less than the average person does in a day. Perhaps you go for periods of up to 24 hours without food, such as on the alternate-day fast. You might eat for only eight hours and then fast for the other 16 hours, like with the 16:8 diet. You could also follow the 5:2 diet, where you spend two days of the week eating 25 percent of your daily allotment of calories.
Following any of these fasting diets could help you control your intake of salt, which helps with your high blood pressure.
After all, this 2016 report in The Sydney Morning Herald cites data from the Florey Institute that discusses how salt is indeed addictive on a brain level. Thus, even though your doctor might ask you to control your intake of salt, if you’re addicted to it, that’s easier said than done.
When you have to forego all food for a while, such as when intermittent fasting, it’s not just salt you’re giving up, but sugar, carbs, and fats too. As you adjust to the changes fasting brings, you may be less concerned about your salt intake than you’d think.
Besides limiting your intake of salt, intermittent fasting can lower your blood pressure in other ways. Eating less causes you to lose weight, which could reduce your risk of metabolic disorder and make controlling your blood pressure possible. Many fasters lose weight by burning fat and restricting calorie consumption.
This 2018 report in Clinical Nutrition ESPEN mentions that intermittent fasting can also reduce bad LDL cholesterol, boost good HDL cholesterol, and lower triglycerides. All this also helps you ward off metabolic disorder and thus possibly heart disease and stroke.
Another interesting report on intermittent fasting and blood pressure comes from a 2012 publication of Nutrition Journal. The study involved a series of participants engaging in Ramadan, an annual religious observance where eating and drinking are not allowed from sunup until sundown.
The researchers reviewed 82 participants, 44 who are female and 38 who are male. The age range of the participants was between 29 and 70 years old. All participants either had cerebrovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, or coronary artery disease.
Per the study, the participants fasted for 10 hours post-Ramadan when they had already fasted for 10 days. By taking blood samples, the researchers studied the participants’ complete blood count, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein levels, homocysteine, blood sugar, lipids, and BMI.
The “10 years coronary heart disease risk score” of the participants had a much better reading after fasting, as did the participants’ waist circumference, BMI, weight, systolic blood pressure, and lipids profile.
It is worth noting that the Nutrition Journal study only found positive effects on the systolic blood pressure of the participants, not the diastolic blood pressure. However, this Healthline tips article for reducing diastolic blood pressure suggests a lot of things you’d do when fasting.
For example, you’re supposed to lose weight, reduce sugar consumption, drink less alcohol, ingest less caffeine, and cut salts, trans fats, and saturated fats. Thus, although the Nutrition Journal study only described blood pressure benefits on systolic blood pressure, fasting can likely lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Just look at famous actor Will Smith, who has high blood pressure. This Insider article mentions that Smith had taken medication for his blood pressure for years. He decided to fast and lowered his blood pressure naturally enough to the point where he stopped taking his meds.
How Long Do You Have to Fast for Blood Pressure Benefits?
If you too would like to fast for lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure, how long should you do it?
That depends. In the case of the Ramadan fasters we talked about in the last section, they spent at least 10 hours a day in a fasted state and reduced their blood pressure. They also fasted for Ramadan, which lasts about a month. Will Smith says he fasted over a period of 10 days.
This 2019 report in the journal Nutrients discusses a study done at Germany’s Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic that involved nearly 1,430 participants. All fasted for periods of four to 21 days and consumed no more than 250 calories a day. Per that data, “the reduction of SBP and DNP in groups of people who fasted for a long period of time” was most prevalent. SBP stands for systolic blood pressure and DNP for diastolic blood pressure, by the way.
Thus, following the recommendations of that study, we’d say that the longer you can fast, the better. If you’re having a hard time getting started, remember that with a lot of intermittent fasts, you can eat throughout the day.
For instance, the 5:2 diet requires that only two days a week, you limit calories to about 500 or 600 a day. The other five days of the week, you can eat normally. We’d suggest you follow a diet conducive to lowering your blood pressure, which means limiting salt especially.
Even on a 16:8 fast, you get eight hours to eat. You can easily fit in all three meals a day and spend some of your fasting time asleep and still reap fasting benefits. Do keep in mind that caloric restriction is necessary or you won’t see the health results we’ve discussed, including lower blood pressure. If you recall, that Germany fasting study had the participants eating no more than 250 calories a day.
Most types of intermittent fasts are tweakable too. For instance, the 16:8 fast is just a division of 24 hours. If you’d rather expand your eating window to 10 hours and fast for 14 hours, that’s allowable. Once you get comfortable with intermittent fasting and you want to challenge yourself, you can even do the opposite and try something like the 18:6 diet.
Conclusion
Intermittent fasting can lower blood pressure in many ways. By eating less salt, you’re not contributing to your already worsening hypertension. Cutting calories helps you lose weight so you can also lower your systolic and diastolic readings.
As a reminder, abstaining from salt could reduce your level of electrolytes, or minerals that in part comprise salt. Make sure you consume some bone broth as part of your fasting diet as you strive to lower your blood pressure or you could worsen preexisting heart arrhythmias. Good luck!