Hibiscus Tea | Herbs That Lower Blood Pressure
If you are looking for natural ways to lower blood pressure, check out hibiscus tea, also known as karkade tea. What’s great about using herbal solutions to fight hypertension is that they are safe and have practically no side effects. It will take longer to achieve results, yet if it works for you, you can easily use this solution for years to control your hypertension. All you need to do is incorporate a moderate amount of hibiscus tea into your daily diet.
Hibiscus Tea To Lower Diastolic Blood Pressure
If you have prehypertension, meaning your blood pressure is between 120/80 and 140/90, you especially need to consider gentle treatments such as hibiscus tea. You might be able to reduce your blood pressure without drugs and avoid all the horrible side effects that using drugs may cause to your body.
If you have moderate hypertension, you, too, are likely to benefit from drinking this kind of tea. In fact, studies were conducted specifically on people with mild to moderate hypertension. Participants had to drink half a liter hibiscus tea before breakfast (group 1) or take captopril, a popular antihypertensive medication (group 2). The reduction in diastolic blood pressure (lower number) was statistically similar in both groups: 79% of people drinking tea and 84% of people taking the drug had their blood pressure reduced by 10 points!
Ten points is a big deal. Have you ever experienced a death in the family, where a relatively young woman, a mother, dies of a heart attack? Have you ever witnessed the debilitating effect of a stroke on stroke survivors who lose mobility, the ability to speak, or eyesight? For people who did, it won’t take long to choose drinking hibiscus tea to decrease their chances of avoiding such a tragedy happening to them.
How does hibiscus tea work to lower blood pressure?
Most drugs lower blood pressure in one of the two ways:
- act as diuretics (increasing the volume of urine and reducing the volume of blood, and therefore reducing its pressure on the blood vessel walls)
- or increasing the diameter of the blood vessels, mostly by relaxing blood vessel walls so that they don’t constrict.
The current hypothesis is that hibiscus provides both of these effects due to the presence of flavonoids known as anthocyanins. Flavonoids in general provide antioxidants to protect the body from the environment’s oxidative effect, so the benefits of hibiscus tea go further than just lowering your blood pressure. It helps to protect your heart among other benefits.
hibiscus tea lowers blood pressure
Where to get hibiscus tea and how to use it
Unlike acai berry and other expensive exotic health foods, hibiscus tea is cheap and readily available both at the major supermarkets, specialty tea stores, and at the health stores. You can buy it online as well.
Hibiscus flowers are bright red, and the tea is bright red too. It has a pleasant taste, enjoyed by most people who drink it. It is very popular in some parts of the world.
Hibiscus tea ideas
Classic hibiscus tea can be made as per instructions on the package. Experiment with adding lemon, honey or cinnamon to find the taste that you enjoy the most.
Hibiscus tea can be stored quite well, so you can make your tea concentrated and store it on the counter for up to 48 hours at the normal temperature of 20-22 degrees C, or even longer in the fridge with a tight cover. Make it concentrated, so that when you need it, you can add either cold or hot water, and won’t need to microwave it. Microwaving kills nutrients, so why do it if you can preserve them?
You can experiment by mixing it up with other teas. You can try dried fruit tea with hibiscus, white or oolong tea with hibiscus, and even ginger tea with hibiscus. Take a look at my ginger tea recipe, and add hibiscus to it. Ginger tea has excellent blood-pressure lowering effects as well.
Make sure to drink a lot of tea every day. If you mix it with other teas, ensure that 2 cups of your daily tea intake are hibiscus tea (so if you mix half fruit tea and half hibiscus tea, you need to drink 4 cups a day).
Make hibiscus tea a part of your 1200 calorie DASH diet. It’s hard to get 100% balanced nutrition on 1200 calories a day, so adding hibiscus tea that contains minerals, vitamins and antioxidants helps to keep your diet more nutritious (and blood pressure lowering.)
Hypertension is a tough condition to deal with as it doesn’t manifest itself and doesn’t always get cured by standard drugs or lifestyle changes. This is why it’s your best bet to find what works for you by trial and error. And it is reassuring to know that more than one scientific research backs up using hibiscus tea to lower your blood pressure.