Nutretics

The garage doors were up, the sun had just set, and a cool summer breeze was keeping the sweat from running down my face and into my eyes.

My bike was turned upside down and I had just gotten the front wheel off when the phone rang. It was an old cordless phone with the antenna broken off and I remember trying to get the grease off my hands so I could answer before the caller hung up.

Back then there always seemed to be a sense of excitement when the phone rang because you never knew who it was, and if you missed the call, it would remain an opportunity lost forever.

This time however, the call anything but exciting. When I said hello, I heard my mother’s voice on the other end of the line and I instantly knew something was wrong.

She wasn’t panicked or out of control but rather calm with a certain directness that wasn’t normal to her character.

Immediately my stomach dropped, and I was overcome with nervousness when she started to tell me that my father was in the hospital.

You see at that time my dad was in fantastic physical shape, he stood six feet tall, weighed 190 pounds and had very minimal body fat.

He was also an active entrepreneur with a lust for life and a regular concern for basic fitness, so it was very surprising to find out that he had been admitted to the hospital for something health related.

Naturally my first question to my mother was, “why” and when she told me he had gotten sick from abnormally high blood pressure I naively let my guard down.

I remember thinking to myself, “high blood pressure is no big deal, it’s not something serious like cancer so there’s nothing to worry about” and I went about my business.

At that time, I had no idea of the negative impact hypertension could have on a person’s body, nor did I understand how close it would come to destroying our family as we knew it.

You see for the next several years my father would battle finding a balance between the right prescription medications and feeling good enough to attack life with the same ferocity as before.

That’s the thing with high blood pressure, not only are medical professionals unsure about what causes it, they’re also unsure about how to properly treat it.

This means most people, including my father, go through a “trial and error” approach with their prescriptions which in turn means long periods of “adjustment” to medications that might never work fully in the first place.

Needless to say, by this time my carefree attitude was gone, and true worry and frustration had set in.

Through my eyes I wanted him to have healthy blood pressure without those nasty side effects from the very medications that were supposed to help him. I guess on a deeper level I was scared that he might die which meant I would lose my mentor, my guide through life’s toughest scenarios and most importantly, my friend.

It meant me being on my own and what if I didn’t measure up without his guidance?

Through his eyes, he wanted to make sure his family would be ok should anything bad happen to him. He wanted to know that his accomplishments would be enough, that his life would have a lasting impact on both his immediate family and friends.

He wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t be forgotten.

And, after all the struggle, all the worry, all the trial and error, we finally got my father to a place where things were good.

He was happy, his blood pressure was better, he wasn’t sick all the time, and we thought things were moving in the right direction.

But high blood pressure can give you a false sense of security, it acts like a thief in the night, stealing what’s most important to you without warning. It works against your health silently and without hesitation, typically with no symptoms to warn you of the impending doom.

So, after all of our battling, after all the prescription medications, all the side effects, all the worry, all the frustration, and all of the happiness from him finally getting healthy, my father still nearly died from complications caused by high blood pressure.

It happened fast and seemingly all at once, one day he was healthy and the next day he was literally dying.

He was in such dire straits that once my mother got him to our local hospital, they immediately rushed him via ambulance to the emergency cardiac center located in the state capital.

There he was diagnosed with something called the “widow maker”, a term used to describe a very serious blockage in one or more of the main arteries to the heart.

It took a team of cardiac surgeons and their amazing staff several hours to complete the open-heart surgery that saved his life. Luckily and by the grace of God, he survived.

But surviving was only half the battle. Much to our dismay we found out that even after having emergency surgery that open up blood flow to his heart, his high blood pressure still remained. It was still there doing damage without warning.

How could this be? If it wasn’t his arteries, then what was actually causing his high blood pressure? That’s the thing with modern medicine, it’s amazing and it saves lives but sometimes it just doesn’t have all the answers you need.

That’s when we decided to become our own advocates for his high blood pressure and heart health.

We would no longer solely rely on the advice from doctors but rather become our own medical research team in search of a better option.

And what we found out was, in most cases, medical professionals can’t pin-point one exact cause for high blood pressure but rather they attribute a number of different causes to the disease.

Things like inflammation, cellular oxidative stress, arterial stiffness, thickening of the blood, plaque buildup, bad cholesterol, triglycerides, diet, stress, lack of exercise and more, can all contribute to high blood pressure.

And while this information was initially overwhelming, we finally understood what we needed to do! It made total sense, one specific cause for high blood pressure doesn’t really exist so how could one specific treatment for high blood pressure ever work?

From that point forward the plan was to get my father off his BP meds completely by using a very targeted diet combined with daily exercise and the right natural supplementation.

Basically, we were going to attack as many known contributors to high blood pressure as we possibly could with only organic and natural means.

In the beginning it seemed daunting - what you can and can’t eat, how processed foods come into play, what nutrients target very specific functions in the body, how much exercise was needed, how can we reduce his stress, how can we reduce his inflammation and so on.

It was a laundry list of items that felt endless, but we knew we had to take care of them if we wanted to achieve our goal.

And as you can imagine, it wasn’t easy, and through what seemed like countless months of trial and error, we finally found a combination of things that seemed to work.

I say seemed to work because with blood pressure there’s always a fluctuation and nothing can ever be considered 100%.

Our biggest discovery was that basic exercise combined with a diet of whole foods and proper portion control would produce a great result on its own and should be considered a great first step.

From there we learned that very specific supplements would act as a booster to the already healthy diet. At first, we tried various different vitamins, nutrients and herbs but eventually we narrowed it down to just a few that were most effective.

Then we focused on the reduction of processed foods in his diet. Processed foods are a huge contributor to high blood pressure because they include toxic chemicals and preservatives.

If we were to only ever accomplish one thing, it would be to remove processed foods from his diet - it’s that important!

Finally, we changed the way we viewed high blood pressure all together. You have to look at the fight against high blood pressure as a marathon versus a sprint.

Blood pressure is fluid and changes regularly so expecting the numbers to be perfect day in and day out was a mistake, and only caused more stress, which in turn caused higher blood pressure.

Now, while we didn’t actually achieve our goal of getting him 100% off prescription medications, we did manage to get him off of 3 major drugs, which was a huge win in our book.

We also learned a very valuable lesson in the process, and that is, high blood pressure isn’t something you can treat with just one medication or just one natural supplement, it takes a total commitment and a 360-degree effort to really effect a change.

It was this new perspective that inspired us to create a company dedicated to the total fight against high blood pressure.