30 Million Americans Were Just Diagnosed With High Blood Pressure, Here"s Why...

30 million Americans who woke perfectly healthy yesterday morning are now suddenly in need of expensive hypertension treatments after the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology decided to lower the definition of "high blood pressure" to 130/80 from the previous trigger of 140/90.  According to Reuters, the change means that nearly 50% of American adults, or roughly 100 million people, now suffer from high blood pressure.

Americans with blood pressure of 130/80 or higher should be treated, down from the previous trigger of 140/90, according to new guidelines announced on Monday by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology.

 

At the new cutoff, around 46 percent, or more than 103 million, of American adults are considered to have high blood pressure, compared with an estimated 72 million under the previous guidelines in place since 2003.

 

High blood pressure accounts for the second-largest number of preventable heart disease and stroke deaths in the United States, second only to smoking.

 

A large, government-sponsored study of hypertension patients aged 50 and older showed in 2015 that death from heart-related causes fell 43 percent and heart failure rates dropped 38 percent when their systolic blood pressure was lowered below 120 versus those taken to a target of under 140.

 

But patients in the 120 systolic blood pressure group had a higher rate of kidney injury or failure, as well as fainting.

Not surprisingly, these new guidelines are expected to be a boon for pharma giants like Merck, Pfizer and Novartis who supply the world"s expensive hypertension medications.

Potentially deadly high blood pressure can be brought under control with a wide array of medications, many sold as relatively inexpensive generics. The drug classes include angiotensin receptor blockers, such as Novartis AG’s Diovan, calcium channel blockers, like Pfizer Incs’s Norvasc, ACE inhibitors, including Pfizer’s Altace, and diuretics, such as Merck & Co Inc’s Hyzaar.

 

But the drugs have side effects and the new guidelines emphasize lifestyle changes including weight loss, diet and exercise as the first tool for combating hypertension.

 

“I think this will encourage both patients to adhere to recommendations but also clinicians to be more vigorous in their attempts to prescribe lifestyle changes,” said Dr. Pamela Morris, chair of the ACC’s committee on prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Of course, perhaps a slight, artificial "tweaking" of their addressable market was exactly the right cure for what"s been ailing Merck"s stock of late...

Thursday Humor? How The Media Controls Your Mind

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

Even as trust in the mainstream media wanes, Americans continue to fall victim to established narratives, waxing hysterical over everything from nuclear war and natural disasters to race wars and disease. But there is at least one voice of reason.

Enter JP Sears, the viral internet sensation who blends sarcasm with spirituality and humor with heavy topics. In his latest video — which is, unsurprisingly, going viral — he breaks down “How to be Mind Controlled.”

He opens the video:

“Would you like the escape the horrible reality of thinking your own thoughts? Me too. Learning to have your mind controlled is your key to escaping the hell of thinking for yourself.”

He delves right into calling out the media for terrifying the population into obedience and submission.

“Good evening,” he says. “Life is a dangerous tragedy. When you accidentally start feeling peaceful or start thinking about what’s really important to you, that’s your cue to turn on the news. We’ll make you scared instead. Then you’ll instinctively want someone to protect you, which will make you completely submissive and controllable to those who you think will protect you.”

Impersonating the average fear-mongered news consumer, JP Sears continues:

“I live in a constant state of fear because scary things would happen if I wasn’t scared all the time.”

“Thinking for yourself is like going to the grocery store and bagging your own groceries,” he muses. “It’s just a lower-class way of thinking. It’s significantly more luxurious to have someone else bag your groceries for you.”

He also waxes existential, tackling the fundamental problem of consciousness in our modern society:

“You’ll sleep better at night when you’re convinced to believe the thoughts in your head are your own. Because they’re in your mind, it’ll be easy for you to believe they came from your mind.”

“You’re free to do anything we want you to do,” he says. “You need to be under the spell of fear to make you hypnotically suggestible.”

“Poverty, disease, terrorism, war, nuclear war, cyber warfare, germ warfare, biochemical warfare, and death are all wonderful things to be afraid of. Then it’s much easier for you to be controlled because you’ll be convinced to do whatever they want you to do because you’ll think doing so will help you avoid one of the things you’re afraid of.”

Sounds about right. This sentiment also aligns with what JP Sears, who started his career as an emotional healing coach, told Anti-Media in an interview earlier this summer. “We as a society, and I mean this in the most loving way … I think we as a society have positioned ourselves as helpless victims bleeding out of power,” he said, referring in particular to the chaos that has enveloped the age of Trump.

He also believes much of the strife we see in society is a result of people’s inner struggles, which are often projected back out into the real world and political world.

“We’ll help you obsessively monitor large-scale politics because it’ll help you ignore your own life,” he says sarcastically in his recent video.

“If you feel worse after watching [the news], then you’re doing better.”

As he said of political language during our interview:

“I think it is an incredibly low vibrational, low consciousness trap of a language. I think political language is not engineered to understand, accept or connect. I think it’s a language based out of the building blocks of separation.”

This is, again, reflected in “How to be Mind Controlled.”

“The scary thing is that if you went a day without watching the news, you’d start to notice that there are a lot more things to appreciate than there are to be afraid of,” he says. “That’s why it’s important to watch the news every day. Preferably three times a day.”

“Imagine the disaster that would happen if you got in touch with your passions. It might lead you to want to do things that are outside of your thrilling coffin of conformity. Then you’d probably end up getting shot at point-blank range by a nuclear missile and eaten by wolves. It’s a scary world out there.”

As JP Sears told us:

“To me, humor can be an awakening language where we listen and consider something that we otherwise wouldn’t even listen to in the first place,” he said. “So, how that works, in my delusional opinion, is that humor is a language of connection, full stop.”

He has made similar videos on topics ranging from the American Heart Association’s condemnation of coconut oil to the 2016 election, as well as the yoga and spiritual communities, vegans, and Millennials.

Resveratrol may Benefit Your Arteries, Especially if You Have Type 2 Diabetes

Resveratrol – a substance found in red wine, peanuts, and berries – may reduce artery stiffness in people with Type 2 diabetes, according to a new study presented in early May at the American Heart Association’s 2017 Scientific Sessions in Minneapolis. [1]

The study’s senior author, Dr. Naomi M. Hamburg, of the Boston University School of Medicine, said:

“This adds to emerging evidence that there may be interventions that may reverse the blood vessel abnormalities that occur with aging and are more pronounced in people with Type 2 diabetes and obesity.”

Read: 4 Health-Protective Qualities of Resveratrol

For the study, researchers recruited 57 obese, middle-aged patients with Type 2 diabetes. Nearly 2/3 of the participants were African American, and slightly more than half were women.

The aorta, the largest artery in the body, stiffens with age and illness, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Researchers tested the participants’ arterial stiffness using a test called the carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity, or CFPWV, after the volunteers consumed daily doses of 100 mg/day of resveratrol for 2 weeks, followed by 300 mg/day of resveratrol for 2 weeks.

The test was performed a second time after participants underwent comparable placebo dosing for a total of 4 weeks.

In addition, researchers assessed the ability of the participants’ blood vessels to expand and relax as needed to allow for changes in blood flow, an important indicator of healthy blood vessel function.

Overall, the study found that participants who took the resveratrol supplements had less arterial stiffness, but it wasn’t statistically significant.

In a subset of 23 patients who had severe aortic stiffness at the beginning of the study, however, the 300 mg dose of resveratrol reduced aortic stiffness by 9.1%, and the 100 mg dose reduced aortic stiffness by 4.8%. [2]

Among the patients that took a placebo for 4 weeks, aortic stiffening worsened.

Past studies in animals showed that resveratrol activates a gene (SIRT1) that seems to delay aging and development of several diseases. To test whether the same thing occurs in humans, researchers took samples from the blood vessel linings of 7 patients and looked at SIRT1 activity. After resveratrol supplementation, they found that gene activity increased slightly in humans.

Source: Dr. Axe

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the antioxidant can undo age-related changes in the arteries, but it’s a step towards helping scientists figure out how resveratrol can reverse age-related changes in the arteries.

Read: Resveratrol Protects Diabetics Against Heart Disease

Lead study author, Dr. Ji-Yao Ella Zhang, Ph.D., also of the Boston University, said:

“We found that resveratrol also activates the longevity gene SIRT1 in humans, and this may be a potential mechanism for the supplements to reduce aortic stiffness.

However, the changes in this small and short-term study are not proof. Studies with longer treatment are needed to test the effects of a daily resveratrol supplement on vascular function.” [1]

Hamburg cautions that resveratrol may not be as beneficial to people without Type 2 diabetes.

“The effect of resveratrol may be more about improving structural changes in the aorta, and less about the relaxation of blood vessels, and people with more normal aortic stiffness may not get as much benefit.” [3]

Sources:

[1] Newsmax Health

[2] Health Day

[3] Healthline

Dr. Axe

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.