In the last video, we talked about stress being the number one factor while there are many other factors contributing to hypertension and high blood pressure.

Hypertension and high blood pressure causes damage to the interior lining of your arteries. This constant beating of the heart and pumping blood takes its toll. The reason it does that is that we have oxidative stress buildup in our bodies from what?

This vlog is number two, the second most important factor in understanding where hypertension comes from is the food we eat.

Let’s say it’s the food that we’re consuming with our minds, the worries about things that happened in the past that we really can’t do anything about and the anticipation of things going wrong in the future that feed this sort of psychosis of being in a constant state of worry, a constant state of stress. I’ve met people who have even gone into chronic sleep deprivation because of stress. They may sleep for a while during the night but they wake up tired because they’re going to bed carrying all those burdens of stress. A funny little story is from the Midwest. It’s just a metaphor but the farmer was carrying his hundred-pound sack of potatoes to market and another farmer with a wagon and a horse pulls up alongside and says, “Friend, join me in the wagon. We’ll ride together.” And the farmer, thanks to him and climbs up into the wagon and continues to have that sack of potatoes on his shoulder.

The farmer says, “Go ahead and put the sack of potatoes down. You’re in the wagon.” He says, “It’s enough that you’re giving me a ride to town. I’ll carry the potatoes.” So we do that. We do that. We carry burdens that are not ours. We carry burdens that there’s nothing that we can really do about it. But here’s something you can take action on and that is how you’re feeding yourself physically. Just as bad negative thoughts contribute to stress and the flip side is heartwarming gratitude, and thankfulness for life, and the blessing of other people versus the judgment and the holding grudges against people. There are two sides, right? There are good thoughts and there are bad thoughts.

In the food world and how we nourish our bodies and the nutrition that we bring into our bodies, there’s good food and bad food.

You may be vegan. You may be a vegetarian. You may eat the standard American diet or you may be paleo or keto or you may follow an aerobatic diet or a macrobiotic diet. There are so many different ways to eat. The commonality between a vegan and a paleo is that generally speaking, the trend is toward raw food, natural food, food that’s actually grown from the ground. Plants and animals that don’t come in a package with an expiring date. Let’s put it that way. The food that is in the aisles of the supermarket that have that expiration date on the bottom of the package, which is food-like substances. That is manufactured food with a lot of added ingredients and a lot of chemicalization that tends to put additional stress on the body because those things are not part of what your DNA understands.

Our DNA is centuries or millenniums old and really we’ve got to get back to the more natural state of eating local, eating fresh as much as you can, and let’s say 90% of the time sticking to that with the 10% the fact that we’re human and we want to enjoy and have pleasure in what we’re eating and maybe have a dessert and a bowl of ice cream or something like that. Now, generally, we don’t promote eating sugar but understanding that we’re human and we want to enjoy our lives, yeah, there’s a time and a place for all that. If you’re consuming 25 teaspoons of sugar every single day, you are going to wind up with some dis-ease that will eventually become a disease. It’s processed food, which is very convenient, very tasty, and all that, versus the natural food of plants and animals that need preparation and need cooking.

That’s the difference between tending to your body to keep your body in a state of balance.