The Blood Pressure Lie Keeping You Sick

I used to wake up dizzy, heart racing, blood pressure cuff reading 145 over 95. My doctor called it genetic and handed me a prescription. With MCAS, POTS, and hypermobile EDS already keeping my nervous system on high alert, another drug that just muted a signal was the last thing I wanted to add. So I asked a different question: why is my body cranking the pressure up in the first place? That question changed how I think about blood pressure.

The story most of us get about high blood pressure is a plumbing story. Arteries are hoses, plaque is the gunk, the heart pumps harder to force blood through a narrower pipe, and the fix is a pill that turns the number down without touching the gunk. That story isn’t entirely wrong, but it treats blood pressure as a mechanical problem. Ray Peat’s work points somewhere else: blood pressure is being run by hormones responding to how well your cells are producing energy.