Dr. Steven Gundry:

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast: how to lower blood pressure naturally. Okay, has your doctor put you on a blood pressure medication? Here’s what they probably didn’t tell you. That pill is not fixing the problem. It’s silencing a smoke alarm while the fire keeps burning. The fire, and it took me 30 years and a lot of humility to figure this out, isn’t even in your heart or blood vessels at all.

[0:33]

I spent those 30 years as a cardiothoracic vascular surgeon. I’ve held failing hearts in my hands. I’ve cut into arteries that should have been soft and springy and young, and found them stiff as an old garden hose. For most of my career, I told my patients the same three things everyone tells you: cut out the salt, lose the weight, take the pill. But I was wrong about the root cause. Not a little wrong — wrong at the foundation.

[1:01]

So today I’m going to walk you through what’s actually driving your numbers up, the foods that start turning it around this week, and one nightly habit, something almost every one of you does before bed, that is quietly sabotaging you every night.

[1:54]

So let’s get into it. But before we do, can I ask you a favor? If you’re enjoying this podcast and it’s helped you or someone you love, can you please leave a review on the platform you listen to it on, like Spotify or Apple? Reviews help other people find the podcast, so they too can transform their health.

Okay, so now let’s discuss the real cause. Let’s start with the single most important molecule in this entire conversation. It’s a gas. Its name is nitric oxide, called NO. Here’s the punchline first: nitric oxide is the master switch that tells your blood vessels to relax and open up. When you make plenty of it, your blood vessels dilate, blood flows freely, and pressure stays down. When you don’t have enough of it, your vessels clamp down, and the blood pressure climbs.

[2:53]

In fact, the lining of your blood vessels, the endothelium, is so dependent on this gas that it makes NO itself. A shortage of nitric oxide is one of the major drivers of high blood pressure and kidney damage. That’s not fringe, that’s just plain cardiology.

Now here’s where it gets interesting, and where nobody connects the dots. You don’t make most of your nitric oxide alone. Your bacteria make it with you. The enzyme system that’s supposed to convert the nitrates in your food into nitric oxide is called eNOS, and here’s the inconvenient truth: eNOS gets sluggish and dysfunctional as we age. So Mother Nature, as she so often does, built a backup generator: a healthy, diverse community of bacteria living on your tongue and in your mouth. They can take the nitrates from, for instance, the leafy greens that you eat, and convert them straight into nitric oxide for you.

[3:52]

Listen to that again. The bugs on your tongue are part of your blood pressure control system. Your gut buddies aren’t just house guests. They’re the pharmacists filling one of the most important prescriptions in your body, and they do it for free.

[4:17]

Takeaway number one: low nitric oxide is a leading cause of high blood pressure, and you are only as good at making nitric oxide as your oral and gut bacteria are healthy.

Which brings me to the call-out, and I want to hammer it because it’s the easiest win in this whole episode: the mouthwash problem. That mouthwash that kills 99.9% of odor-causing germs, the one you gargle before bed? It’s telling you the truth in the ad. It isn’t telling you the cause. Multiple human studies show that common antibacterial mouthwashes wipe out the very bacteria on your tongue that make your nitric oxide. So the cure for bad breath comes with a hidden receipt.

[5:17]

As I like to put it, your fresh minty breath is being paid for with a future blood pressure prescription. If they printed that on the label, you’d probably think twice. And it’s not a one-way street. People with a disrupted oral microbiome tend to have a disrupted gut microbiome, too. Worse, oral bacteria that get loose don’t stay in your mouth. I’ve found them in heart valves, in aortic aneurysms, and embedded in arterial walls. Leaky mouth, leaky heart. That minty gargle may be doing far more downstream than freshening your breath.

[5:46]

But here’s an ancient wisdom that turns out to be right. Instead of nuking your mouth, gently scrape your tongue. Studies show periodic tongue scraping actually promotes a more diverse oral microbiome, which means better nitric oxide production. Once again, this ancient practice beats the modern chemical. So, takeaway number two: ditch the antibacterial mouthwash. Scrape your tongue instead. You’re protecting your body’s nitric oxide factory.

[6:37]

All right, let’s get even deeper. Leaky gut leads to stiff arteries. Let’s follow the trail down from the mouth to the gut, because this is where the pressure really comes from. When your gut wall is damaged, what we call leaky gut, bacterial fragments called lipopolysaccharides, or LPS, slip into your bloodstream. Your immune system treats these fragments exactly like an infection and lights the fuse of chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation does something very specific to your arteries: it constricts them and stiffens them. There’s an old saying that I tell all my patients: you are only as young as your arteries are flexible. Inflammation ages them.

[7:35]

This isn’t just hand-waving. A study of more than 600 middle-aged women out of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center found that the women with the most gut bacterial diversity had the least stiff arteries. But when the bad bugs take over, the arteries turn rigid. And rigid arteries mean rising blood pressure.

Now, the gut buddies that normally protect your gut lining make a compound called butyrate. In people with atherosclerosis, the butyrate markers are depleted, which lets more LPS and a gut permeability protein called zonulin flood into your blood. But watch what happens when you flip it. When mice with this problem were fed a high-butyrate diet for 10 weeks, the atherosclerosis in their aortas dropped by 50%, just by feeding the gut.

[8:33]

So, takeaway number three: stiff, high-pressure arteries begin as an inflamed, leaky gut. Heal the gut lining, and the arteries start to soften again.

So what’s punching the holes in the gut in the first place? A big culprit is a family of plant proteins called lectins. The poster child is wheat germ agglutinin, WGA, from whole wheat. WGA is so small that it can slip across the gut wall without even a leaky gut. And here’s the detail that stopped me cold as a surgeon. When researchers tagged WGA and followed where it went after you swallow it, they found it stuck directly to the lining of the blood vessels, to a delicate protective coating called the glycocalyx. You now have, in effect, a splinter jammed into your artery wall. Your immune system attacks that splinter and attacks the artery itself. That inflammatory attack on the vessel is a root cause of atherosclerosis, which, like so many other chronic diseases, is really an autoimmune disease.

[9:58]

So, takeaway number four: your healthy whole wheat toast may be sticking to your artery walls and inviting inflammation and immune attack. This is why what you take out of your diet matters as much as what you add.

So, part two: are there foods that naturally lower blood pressure? Let’s talk about your grocery list, because the fix is genuinely delicious.

[10:28]

Number one, polyphenol-rich foods. These are vessel relaxers. Polyphenols are the single most important class of compounds missing from the modern diet. These are the plant chemicals that give leaves and fruit their color. When your gut buddies metabolize them, they turn them into powerful anti-inflammatory, vessel-opening compounds.

Here’s what’s remarkable. For decades, we thought olive oil and red wine protected the heart directly. Well, they do protect it, but the mechanism is in the gut. The polyphenols in red wine and olive oil actually remodel and re-educate your microbiome, so it stops producing artery-damaging compounds. We’ll talk about that in a minute. So, your best sources: extra virgin, first cold-pressed olive oil; extra dark chocolate, 75% cacao and up, about an ounce a day (your gut buddies are begging for it); and red wine in genuine moderation, six ounces a day at the most. Takeaway number five: polyphenols don’t just relax your vessels. They retrain the bacteria that decide whether your arteries stay soft or turn to stone.

[14:15]

Number two, nitrate-rich vegetables. These are nature’s nitric oxide boosters. Remember that nitric oxide story from part one? This is where you feed it. Arugula, celery and raw beets are loaded with dietary nitrates that your tongue bacteria will convert into nitric oxide. These are quite literally nature’s NO boosters. Now, there’s a nuance with beets because this trips people up. Raw beets are a green-light food. But when you cook beets down, the sugar concentrates. So please keep them raw. What do you do? You slice them thin into a salad with arugula and olive oil, and you’ve built a nitric oxide machine on the plate.

[15:13]

Number three, leafy greens and avocado, not the banana. I know you’ve been told to eat a banana for the potassium, and I’m going to push back. Modern fruit is basically candy, and a banana is a sugar bomb your gut buddies don’t need. Get your minerals and your vessel support from leafy greens and avocado instead: greens your gut buddies adore, and avocado, a fruit that behaves like a healthy fat. So, takeaway number six: skip the banana. Reach for a big pile of greens and half an avocado.

[15:41]

Number four, garlic and the allium family: garlic, onions, leeks, shallots, chives. The whole allium family sits on my yes food list, and for good reason. Garlic and these guys are rich in prebiotic fibers that feed your good gut bugs. And when you feed the gut buddies that keep your gut well sealed, you’re putting out inflammation at the root, and inflammation, as we now know, is what stiffens arteries in the first place.

[16:11]

Number five, walnuts and omega-3s for flexible arteries. The people in my practice with the healthiest arteries and the highest omega-3 levels are, without exception, the ones eating small oily fish: sardines, herring, anchovies. In fact, a study following nearly 400,000 people for 16 years found that those with the highest omega-3 intake had significantly lower cardiovascular mortality. If fish isn’t your thing, walnuts are one of the great polyphenol and omega-3 nuts. A quarter cup a day is a great daily habit. Just remember, fried fish doesn’t count, so back off on the fish and chips.

[17:09]

Number six, fermented foods for microbiome diversity. Everything in part one came back to one word: diversity. The more diverse your microbiome, the more flexible your arteries. So sauerkraut, kimchi and other fermented foods are how you widen that bacterial gene pool. In one study, people who ate just 30 grams of chocolate a day for three weeks measurably increased their microbiome diversity and improved their mood. A nice reminder that feeding these bugs pays dividends in more ways than one.

[17:37]

All right, part three: you can’t eat your way out of a leaky gut. So here’s what comes off the table. First, remove lectin-heavy conventional grains and legumes: wheat and beans that haven’t been prepared correctly are dripping with the lectins that pry your gut wall open. Now, I’m not the “beans are evil” guy people make me out to be. Beans are a wonderful source of resistant starch and prebiotic fiber if you pressure cook them, which defangs the lectins. A modern one-touch pressure cooker is one of the best blood pressure tools in your kitchen. Prepare them my way, or leave them alone.

[18:35]

Second, ditch the ultra-processed low-sodium foods. This is a trap. In the great war on salt, the food industry pulled the sodium and quietly replaced it with sugar and cheap seed oils, both of which drive the inflammation that’s actually raising your blood pressure. You solved a problem you didn’t have and created the one you did. And here’s the nuance the salt police miss: for most people, blood pressure was never primarily a salt problem. It’s a nitric oxide and inflammation problem. So don’t white-knuckle the salt shaker while eating inflammatory processed food from a box. That’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

[19:30]

And one more sneaky one: fructose. Even natural fruit sugar, eaten in large amounts year-round, actively reduces nitric oxide synthesis, and high fructose intake is linked to heart fibrosis and vessel constriction. Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean you should eat it by the bushel. Eat fruit like the seasonal treat it was meant to be.

[19:59]

But some levers can multiply it. Time-restricted eating. You’ve got to give your gut a nightly break. Digestion is hard work, and it’s the moment your gut wall is under the most stress. It’s literally when LPS hitches a ride into your bloodstream. When you compress your eating window and, critically, stop eating at least three hours before bed, you give the gut wall time to repair. You lower inflammation, and you produce ketones that strengthen that lining. Start easy with a 12-hour eating window, like 8 o’clock in the morning to 8 o’clock at night. Then shorten it week by week, by one hour each week, towards six to eight hours. Studies show that even just doing it Monday through Friday makes a huge difference.

[20:53]

Second, work your vagus nerve. This is the part almost nobody talks about, and it’s real physiology. The vagus nerve is the landline connecting your gut and your brain. And here’s the number that changes how you think about it: for every fiber running down from the brain to the gut, there are nine fibers running up from the gut to the brain. Nine to one. The gut is doing most of the talking. The vagus is how it regulates inflammation and calms your whole nervous system. And you have a manual override: your breathing. Anytime you slow your breathing on purpose, you’re directly toning that nerve, dialing down the inflammation and the blood pressure. A few minutes of slow, deliberate breathing is a legitimate blood pressure intervention, and it’s free.

[21:49]

Next, sleep. This is non-negotiable. You cannot supplement your way, you cannot medicate your way, out of bad sleep. It’s during deep sleep that your body does its repair and clears out the metabolic garbage. No polyphenol, no pill substitutes for it.

Next, vitamin D. Get your level checked. Nearly every inflamed, exhausted patient who walks into my office is deficient in vitamin D, and low vitamin D tracks closely with metabolic syndrome and inflammation, the exact fire we’re trying to put out. This is the number one thing I’d ask your doctor to actually measure. Most people need far more than they’re getting.

[22:46]

All right, part five. Here’s my honest position, and one I’ve held for years: I’d always rather you get this from your plate. In fact, for most of my career, I didn’t even stock my own products in my office. I pointed patients to grocery store polyphenols instead. But I’m a realist. Most people, most days, don’t eat enough polyphenols to hit a therapeutic dose. That’s where supplementation becomes a bridge, not a replacement for the diet, but a bridge across that gap. As I say, supplements should supplement what you’re doing with your diet.

[23:25]

On polyphenols and blood vessels specifically, this science is close to my heart, because I’ve been publishing about the effect of polyphenols on the stickiness and flexibility of blood vessels for 25 years. Just last year, a study out of Canada, which I had nothing to do with, put two groups head to head: one on regular olive oil, one on a high-polyphenol olive oil. Only the high-polyphenol group showed dramatic improvement in vascular flexibility and less inflammation in their blood vessels. Same oil, wildly different results, and the entire difference was the polyphenol content. That’s the whole thesis of this episode in one experiment. It’s the polyphenols, and it’s the gut.

[24:24]

So if diet alone isn’t getting you there, a concentrated polyphenol source, a genuine high-polyphenol olive oil like Gundry MD’s Polyphenol-Rich Olive Oil, or a broad polyphenol blend like Vital Reds, is a reasonable bridge while you rebuild your terrain. I’ve published on grapeseed extract, French maritime pine bark, resveratrol, and some of the other polyphenols with the strongest vascular track record.

So in closing, here’s what I want you to carry out of this episode. Your blood pressure isn’t broken. Your gut is talking to you through your arteries, and it’s finally time to listen. Feed the right bacteria, and they will take care of your arteries for you. That’s the deal Mother Nature offered, and it still stands.

[25:21]

So tonight, do just one thing: skip the mouthwash and let the nitric oxide bacteria on your tongue do the job they were born to do. And this week, retire your fear of the salt shaker and reach for real food instead. A drizzle of high-polyphenol olive oil, a handful of arugula, an ounce of extra dark chocolate. Your arteries are asking for polyphenols. Your gut buddies are asking for polyphenols. Give them what they want.

If someone you love is on a high blood pressure medication right now, send them this episode. It might be the ten minutes that changes everything for them.

[26:18]

Now it’s time for the question of the week. It comes from @Roche7 on my YouTube video on iron deficiency. They ask, “What if you have extremely low iron but high hemoglobin?” Well, that’s a very good question. Certainly, you don’t see that very often. But the thing you actually want to look for on your complete blood count is the MCV, the mean corpuscular volume, and you should also look at the MCHC, the mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration. Those will both tell you whether your iron deficiency is actually causing a problem with the amount of iron in your hemoglobin. If those are okay, you actually don’t have an iron problem. On the other hand, if your MCV is low or your MCHC is low, you do have an iron problem despite what your hemoglobin says. By the way, what’s your hematocrit? That’s another way of measuring this. Great question.

[27:16]

Now it’s time for the review of the week. It comes from @FoxRiver778 on my YouTube video on what poop can tell you about your microbiome. They said, “Beautiful presentation on the subject. So much education in this one video about something most of us never really think much about, or were always curious to know about but were afraid to ask.” Well, thanks for that review. This is something that most people really don’t think much about, maybe don’t want to think much about. But your poop is really determining what’s happening to you as a functioning human being, and the more you know about your poop, the better.

[28:20]

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[28:54]

That’s a wrap on today’s episode. Before you go, I want to leave you with one task. If anything you heard today made you think, made you want to dig deeper, or gave you something that you’re going to pass along to someone you care about, please take 15 seconds and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I know that sounds small, but those reviews are how Apple and Spotify decide which shows to surface to new listeners, and this show only grows when people who’ve never heard of it suddenly find it. That person finding this podcast today could hear something that genuinely improves their life or the life of someone they love, maybe even saves one.

Everything I share here comes from my research when writing my next book and my clinics, where I’ve been seeing patients six days a week for over 25 years, working with nutrition and supplements as the primary treatment. This is real-world medicine. Help me get it to more people.

And thank you. Truly, thank you. I’m Dr. G, and I’m always looking out for you.