Be Still My Beating Kidneys: What They Never Told You About BLOOD PRESSURE (Part 3 of 3)

This is a series!  Make sure you start at Part 1!

High-Protein and All-Meat Diets

Protein metabolism produces nitrogen waste, primarily urea. The more protein consumed, the more waste must be filtered. All-meat and very high-protein diets dramatically increase filtration demand. This does not appear as a failure immediately. It shows up as an increased workload year after year.

Influencers promoting all-meat diets rarely talk about kidneys because kidney damage is slow, quiet, and delayed.

Alcohol

Alcohol metabolism generates waste, disrupts fluid balance, and increases vascular resistance. Chronic use keeps the system in a state where higher pressure is required just to maintain baseline function.

Nicotine

Nicotine constricts blood vessels and increases oxidative stress. That increases resistance throughout the circulatory system, making it harder for the heart to deliver adequate pressure to the kidneys.

Caffeine

Caffeine stimulates the nervous system and raises baseline vascular tone. For someone already compensating, this repeatedly pushes the system toward higher demand.

Chronic Stress

Stress hormones tighten blood vessels and alter fluid handling. A chronically stressed body requires higher pressure to move blood through a more resistant system.

Drinking Excess Water

Blindly following government slogans like “drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day” is not benign advice, especially for the kidneys. You already have a hydration regulator. It’s called thirst. When it works, it works well.

Healthy kidneys evolved to manage fluid based on need, not based on a schedule or a bottle with time markers. Just like animals in the wild, when you are thirsty, you drink. When you are not, you stop.

Andy Kaufman’s assertion that drinking more water solves the high pressures is wrong-just diluting the problem to lower the pressure is simply cause and effect. In states of increased metabolic load, resistance, or clearance demand, a higher blood pressure is a normal adaptive response that preserves kidney filtration and prevents internal toxicity, not a pathology to be reflexively suppressed.

You haven’t addressed the underlying issues AND you have altered pressure, lowering pressure doesn’t mean improvement. There is plenty of evidence to support healthy higher pressures.

Walking around all day, sipping water from the adult version of a sippy cup, overrides this system. Sure, you look ridiculous, but more importantly, you are forcing your kidneys to do unnecessary work.

Every extra sip has to be filtered, balanced, and excreted. Excess water increases filtration demand, dilutes electrolytes, and forces the kidneys to adjust sodium and water handling to keep blood chemistry stable. In people with already stressed kidneys, this can contribute to fluid overload, swelling, and worsening pressure dynamics. More water does not mean cleaner blood. It often means more kidney labor for no benefit. Yes drinking excess water past your thirst can be detrimental.

“Obey your thirst” is right about one thing: don’t drink unless you are thirsty, and don’t drink anything but water. Juice, soda, sweetened drinks, and “hydration products” only add metabolic load. If salt and lemon water genuinely quenches thirst and tastes like nirvana, fine. But only if it satisfies thirst. Not because you think you’re supposed to be drinking something all the time.

Hydration is not a virtue contest. It is not about hitting a quota. It is about respecting the kidneys’ role in regulating volume. When you drink past thirst, you force the kidneys into constant correction mode. When you listen to them, you let them do what they were designed to do without unnecessary interference.

Put the sippy cup down. Your kidneys will thank you.

Electrolyte Manipulation

Electrolytes are not supplements. They are mechanical and electrical regulators of pressure and flow.

Blood does not move through vessels by force alone. It also moves along electrical gradients. Gerald Pollack’s work and David Parker of What Really Makes You Ill demonstrate that water structured next to biological blood vessel surfaces carries a negative charge, and that this charge separation contributes to blood flow without requiring added pressure.

Blood itself carries a net negative electrical charge when pH and electrolyte balance are intact. Healthy blood vessels also maintain a negative surface charge. When those charges are preserved, blood moves efficiently. Flow is supported, resistance is lower, and less pressure is required to achieve filtration. Disrupt the charge, and the system must rely more heavily on force.

Electrolytes determine the charge environment.

Sodium: Context, Charge, and Consistency Matter

Sodium is required to maintain circulating volume, filtration pressure, and electrical charge balance. Adequate sodium supports blood volume and helps preserve the electrochemical conditions that allow blood to move efficiently.

The problem is not sodium itself.
The problem is how it is delivered and how erratically it is manipulated.

Manufactured sodium chloride delivers sodium as a free charge. It lacks the trace minerals that help stabilize electrical balance and vascular surface charge. Absorption is abrupt. Volume shifts are sharp. Electrical gradients fluctuate.

Sea salt, by contrast, delivers balanced accompanying minerals that support steadier charge balance. It behaves less like a blunt load and more like a physiologic signal.

Chronic low-sodium diets are particularly disruptive. Restriction lowers blood volume and alters charge gradients. Blood becomes harder to move. Resistance rises. The kidneys compensate by increasing internal pressure to preserve filtration.

BP Drugs Disrupt “Potassium”

Potassium is electrically active. It directly controls vascular tone, cardiac conduction, and cellular excitability. Its balance depends almost entirely on adequate kidney filtration and pressure. Many blood pressure drugs disrupt this balance by design.

Diuretics lower pressure by forcing sodium and water out of the body through the kidneys. Potassium is lost alongside them. This is not a random effect; it is the mechanism of action. Blood volume drops, filtration pressure drops, and potassium is excreted in excess.

The result is low potassium levels, which destabilize electrical signaling. Heart rhythm becomes vulnerable. Vessels lose smooth tone control. Pressure regulation becomes erratic instead of adaptive. This is why patients taking B/P drugs often get heart arrhythmias.

Other blood pressure drugs interfere by reducing kidney perfusion or altering hormonal signaling that normally fine-tunes potassium handling. In all cases, potassium control becomes less precise because the kidney is being forced to work under constrained pressure.

Potassium supplements are often added to correct the problem of drug intervention. This assumes intact clearance. When kidney reserve is limited, potassium can swing from low to dangerously high with little warning. Both extremes are dangerous and potentially fatal.

Low potassium increases irritability and arrhythmia risk.

High potassium suppresses conduction and can stop the heart.

By the way, potassium is not a vitamin, and the supplements are not food-derived. They are industrial potassium salts sourced from potash, a mined mineral deposit usually formed from ashes. Potassium is chemically created like a soup and is not a natural element on the Periodic Fable of Elements. It is created by chemically reacting potash with acids or bases to form stable salts that act like potassium chemically in the body, forming compounds such as chloride, citrate, or gluconate. This reaction is required because elemental potassium is extremely reactive and unsafe. The end product is a chemically created and then refined ionic compound designed for stability and absorption, not for physiologic pacing or regulation.

These compounds dissociate rapidly upon ingestion, releasing free potassium into circulation. There is no food matrix, no gradual release, and no buffering context.

This matters because potassium safety depends on the rate and clearance. Food-based potassium arrives slowly and is self-limiting. Supplemental potassium arrives as a chemical bolus (a massive, all-at-once loading dose) and places the full burden of regulation on the kidneys. Boom. That’s the sound of the 57th smoking gun against altering blood pressure in any way, shape, or form.

Calcium and Vitamin D: Charge Loss Through Stiffening

Calcium regulates muscle contraction, including that of the heart and blood vessels. Chronic supplementation, especially when amplified by vitamin D, cholecalciferol, or D-Con Rat poison, promotes calcification and stiffness of all blood vessels AND the glomerular capsules of the kidneys, causing pieces of the filters to break off, also known as kidney stones.

Stiff vessels lose surface charge integrity. Electrical flow becomes less efficient. More pressure is required to move blood through a hardened system.

This is how leaching calcium and other minerals from bone quietly increases pressure demand while appearing “supportive” on paper. The mechanism is not unique to humans. In animals with bones, the same process applies: minerals are pulled from structural tissue into the bloodstream under chronic chemical pressure, raising circulating calcium and gradually calcifying vessels, organs, and filtration surfaces. What starts as redistribution ends as stiffening, and stiff systems require higher pressure to function.

There is no debate here. This is basic biology. When something dissolves bone, it does not magically become health-promoting just because the dose is smaller, the label is nicer, or your hero told you it was beneficial. The fact that it reliably kills small animals should have been the first clue, not the ninety-eighth smoking gun.

Magnesium works because it relaxes muscles and alters electrical gradients

It relaxes skeletal, vascular smooth, and cardiac muscles. Vascular tone drops. Resistance drops. Electrical signaling shifts. Blood pressure falls. Magnesium’s action is functionally similar to drugs like Flexeril.

Both drugs reduce muscle contraction by lowering excitability, not by correcting the underlying cause of tension or cramping.

Flexeril works centrally by depressing neural signaling to skeletal muscle. Magnesium works peripherally by altering ionic gradients that muscles and nerves rely on to fire. Different entry points, same outcome: forced relaxation. That’s why you think it’s working to relieve your muscle cramping. It is masking the symptoms, which is why the return occurs when you stop either drug.

That relaxation feels therapeutic because symptoms quiet down. But just like Flexeril, magnesium does not restore normal mechanics or signaling. It overrides them. When the vascular muscle is relaxed this way, pressure drops, force delivery falls, and the kidneys are forced to compensate to maintain filtration. Muscle cramps resolve because contraction thresholds are chemically suppressed. That feels corrective. It is not. Magnesium does not restore normal electrical balance. It overrides excitability, causing the body to compensate.

A lower tone means a lower force is delivered to the kidneys. Filtration cannot fall, so the kidneys compensate mechanically and electrically to preserve clearance. Now the kidneys are taxed. A few days of this, your body can handle. In a few months and years, you are pushing your kidneys to the breaking point.

Cramps are often a signal of pressure instability, volume imbalance, or disrupted charge dynamics. Magnesium silences that signal by pharmacologic relaxation.

Supplements Marketed as “Heart Healthy”

This category causes real damage because it is trusted.

Nitric oxide boosters work by forcing vasodilation. Resistance drops. Pressure drops. Filtration force drops. Compensation rises.

Fish oil alters platelet behavior and vascular responsiveness. Subtle changes, repeated daily, shift how pressure is handled. Eat the whole fish, not the isolated oil that is rancid. If a supplement “improves circulation,” it is interfering with regulation. There is no exception clause for good intentions.

Cosmetic and Performance Drugs 

(Where the Mechanism Is Impossible to Ignore)

Minoxidil was a blood pressure drug before it was a hair product. Hair regrowth is a side effect of vasodilation. That same vasodilation reduces the force available to kidney filtration.

Hair grows. Kidneys compensate…until they don’t.

Sildenafil, Viagra, and related drugs enhance nitric oxide signaling. They lower resistance and pressure transiently. Used repeatedly, they become another chronic tone disruptor.

Improved erections do not improve kidney physiology. They are simply proof that vasodilation worked. But you borrowed from one system to pay another until the bank runs dry, and you have to start stealing from the body until it finally can no longer function on borrowed time and succumbs to your chemical insults.

HTR, Hormones, and Hormone Mimics

The thyroid hormone increases heart rate and contractility. Steroids alter volume and sodium handling. Sex hormones shift vascular compliance. These are not side effects. They are pressure modifiers by design.

Changing hormones changes pressure requirements. The kidneys adapt until they can’t.

Why Solvents Always Do Damage

Solvents like DMSO, turpentine, and related compounds are effective precisely because they dissolve fats and disrupt lipid structures. That is their defining property. Myelin, cell membranes, and vascular linings are fat-rich lipid structures. When a solvent enters the bloodstream, it does not “target toxins.” It interacts with whatever lipid surfaces it encounters.

Myelin is an insulating sheath composed largely of lipids. Its function depends on structural integrity. Solvents weaken that integrity by solubilizing lipid components, altering membrane permeability, and destabilizing electrical signaling. The result is impaired nerve conduction, altered vascular tone, and increased reliance on compensatory pressure mechanisms to maintain flow and filtration.

The same chemistry applies to fatty deposits and protective lipid layers in blood vessels and kidneys. Solvents dissolve what they contact indiscriminately. When lipid barriers are disrupted, resistance increases, signaling becomes erratic, and pressure requirements rise to preserve function. It is chemical interference with structures the body depends on to regulate flow, charge, and filtration.

Solvents do exactly what they are designed to do. The problem is not that they work. The problem is what they work on.

The Rule That Has Not Failed Yet

If something:

• relaxes blood vessels

• alters volume

• changes signaling

• “improves circulation”

• suppresses a symptom without reducing load

Then it alters pressure in the kidney’s until it reaches a point of permanent damage.

The Final Checkmate

Every intervention discussed above shares the same underlying problem: it falsely alters force, charge, or volume without reducing the load that must be cleared. Blood pressure drugs, electrolyte manipulation, supplements, vasodilators, hormones, and so-called “heart-healthy” products do not remove metabolic waste, chemical burden, or resistance, they add to it. They redistribute the workload so you think the intervention is working.

The heart generates pressure. The kidneys require pressure to filter blood. When force is artificially reduced, vessels are relaxed, charge gradients are disrupted, or volume is diluted, filtration is not optional.

This progression is not mysterious. It does not require a rare disease, bad luck, or toxic intent. It follows directly from asking a closed system to perform the same work under worse conditions for years. When numbers improve while reserve disappears, the outcome is delayed, not prevented.

You cannot separate heart health from kidney health. You cannot suppress a signal and call it resolution. And you cannot repeatedly interfere (enter a state of fear so you interfere) with the mechanics of circulation without eventually losing the organs that depend on them.

That is the end of the argument. Oh and check the references. I am basing this on evidenced based reality, not industry sponsored paid for peer reviewed garbage from your practitioner who profits from your ignorance.

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