Exchange Your Blood Pressure Meds For Exercise

Medications for blood pressure can do wonders, if you’re someone who is seriously concerned about your cardiovascular health. And visceral fat is another issue that can affect your heart, which some meds may reduce. But two new studies show that if you start exercising, those pills may not be needed.

Both studies used interesting methods. One of them studied data from studies, according to this article:

The researchers now gathered 391 randomized, controlled trials — the accepted gold standard for testing treatments — that looked at either a drug or some form of exercise to lower blood pressure. Together, the experiments included almost 50,000 volunteers, with more than 10,000 of them in the exercise studies.

They crunched the data, while weighting the various drugs and exercise to calculate the impact of each.

The second study, looking at visceral fat, from the same article:

…researchers…rounded up recent relevant drug experiments and similar randomized trials using exercise to fight visceral fat. All of the experiments had to have lasted for at least six months. Then they aggregated results.

They crunched these numbers as well, and what they found in both is that exercise was either as good as or better than medications when it came to lowering blood pressure and trimming visceral fat.

So does that mean you can just toss your pills in the trash? Absolutely not. You need to make sure you are taking care of these issues with exercise first, and that requires actually getting out there and exercising. Talk to your doctor and see if this is right for you; and even if you still need your meds, the exercise will still do plenty good.

-Shane M.