Hypertension/High Blood Pressure and Keto * Low-Carb

I was diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure) a long time ago— even before I started doing low-carb. But I was low-to-no income, and not yet on SSI disability and Medicaid, and so couldn’t keep up with doctor visits to be able to keep taking hypertension pills.

I think when I first started doing low-carb (in the 1990s) that it brought down my blood pressure. After all, doing Keto * Low=Carb is a reliable way to get your blood sugar down— so much so that doctors warn people to go to their own doctor to get their blood pressure and blood sugar pills’ doses cut down when they start Keto * Low-Carb. It’s a reliable effect.

But not enough of a reliable effect to overcome my years of carb-eating and vegetarianism. I developed Type 2 diabetes, and not too long after I began to have bad kidney tests. My blood pressure was high— not super-high or scary-high as long as I was doing low-carb most of the time, but still, high. My ‘PCP’ (the non-doctor who is my government-approved health care provider) threatened that I would be put in ‘a home’ because of my Asperger Syndrome if I refused to go to a nephrologist (kidney doctor) in the city of Iron Mountain, even though that’s more of a drive than I could handle. [My therapist at the time confirmed that they don’t put people with Asperger Syndrome and high IQs into ‘homes’ for disobeying a non-doctor.]

One nephrologist was from India, and though a conventional low-fat advocate who tried to push the ‘DASH diet’ on me, had some medical smarts and ordered tests to see if I had some underlying kidney problem. They fired her though, and the nephrologist I had to go to next was a woman from the Philippines who told me that my diet could not affect my kidney disease (I knew there was at least one peer-reviewed study to the contrary) and she also demanded that I take home a DVD about dialysis— even after I told her I had no working DVD player! Maybe I was supposed to sleep with the DVD under my pillow and the info would leak into my head that way? Anyway, I quit going back to her after that. My ‘PCP’ didn’t try to have me put in a home after all (and now denies she ever said it) but the bad thing was that I went off my hypertension pill.

When I had a small stroke in Feb. of 2019, I ended up on two hypertension pills, and my PCP recently increased the dose of one of them. I am now getting better blood pressure readings every morning. My Keto * Low-Carb lifestyle has not brought down my blood pressure by itself, nor has it healed my kidney disease. But I do believe it is helping heal my body. I just need pills as well now.

RESEARCH:

A 2011 study in the scientific journal PLOS One showed that a ketogenic diet reversed diabetic kidney damage in diabetic mice in two months.

A 2013 study of a small human trial published in The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology showed improvement of kidney function in diabetics on a ketogenic diet for 12 weeks.