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Blood Pressure: Mountain, Molehill?

Day One: No coffee blood-pressure experiment.

140/90 at 8:30 a.m. before eating any food.
137/84 at 9:30 a.m. half an hour after breakfast.
139/93 at 10:30 a.m.
127/79 at 1:30 p.m. half an hour after lunch.
142/86 at 4 p.m. one hour after the usual three-mile walk.

Average of those five BP readings for the day: 137/86.

Average of the three BP readings done on an earlier day in the caffeinated state: 139/88.

So, "it's a wash" basically. I hope I will have the courage to continue the no-coffee experiment for another day or two, just in case the coffee is having a longer-term (several-day) impact on my BP and therefore I need to let more time elapse before the BP creeps downwards.

I don't much like hovering somewhere near a 140/90 average because this may become too interesting for the doctors to ignore. I'm already doing all of the lifestyle things advised by the AHA, so what next, if it's not coffee....
 
There!!! I’ve winnered you! You are a winner.

Trust me, I feel your pain. Between my quirky stomach, food intolerance and the big D I’ve given up SO many foods. Not fun.
 
Caffeine can cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure, even if you don't have high blood pressure. It's unclear what causes this spike in blood pressure.
Some researchers believe that caffeine could block a hormone that helps keep your arteries widened. Others think that caffeine causes your adrenal glands to release more adrenaline, which causes your blood pressure to increase.
Some people who regularly drink caffeinated beverages have a higher average blood pressure than do those who drink none. Others who regularly drink caffeinated beverages develop a tolerance to caffeine. As a result, caffeine doesn't have a long-term effect on their blood pressure.

Source: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases...re/expert-answers/blood-pressure/faq-20058543.

So, I don't yet know which of those two groups I fall in.

On the other hand, as someone who has been drinking 6 cups of coffee, spanning much of the day, it does mean that much of the day, my BP could be affected by coffee even if I am "tolerant to caffeine." Not clear how much this matters!
 
Day Two: No coffee blood-pressure experiment.

118/83 at 8 a.m. before eating any food.

Much lower than same time yesterday (when it was 140/90), and close to "normal" according to the Heart Police.

On the downside, I have a dull headache. It started yesterday. Perhaps this is the "coffee withdrawal headache" that others keep mentioning but I never experienced before.
 
@Grateful you are looking at this as a short test, and a short fix.

It isn't.

When I was sent home from my surgery with a bp monitor and suspected White Coat Syndrome, I was told to test my bp 3x each morning, and 3x each evening for a week.
Then come back and they would average it.

Knowing what I do now, I think that was still too short a time and too few tests. Bp jumps around all over, and fluctuates across the day. Mine is higher in the mornings, lower in the evenings, food times affects it. Sleep. Indigestion... So does work, exercise, family stress, long car journeys, shopping trips...

Your tests need to be over a long enough period that these little blips and bumps fade out into the background noise and you can see the trends.

If you are going to test this properly, you need to get your spread sheet sorted, with a graph, and do something like this:

Drink coffee for several days.
Test BP consistently over those days.

Then stop coffee.
Test BP consistently over several days (no way is one day enough to show you ANYTHING) as the coffee leaves your system - and those chemicals leaving the system may take a lot longer than 5 days.

Then re-introduce the coffee.
Test consistently...

Rinse and repeat.

And then, if you have proved to your satisfaction that coffee is not a problem for you, you go on to test salt. And exercise. And whatever other things you can think of... in the same steady, systematic way.

When I was testing myself and bp with coffee I repeated the cycle 3 times. Once as a trial to see what happened. The second time to confirm my curious findings. The third time to make sure that I hadn't messed up the other twice. It was actually quite funny. I mentioned my ongoing testing to a friend and got a whole lecture from them on how inaccurate home testing anything is, how silly I was to take anything into my own hands, and that only doctors have a clue about these things, and it should all be left to the professionals. Haha! I also recall her mentioning that no way could I know how to do these tests.

As you can imagine, it turned into quite a long exchange of views.

Since you have already given up coffee once, you are only on Day 2 of Step 2 in the cycle of testing I described above, but if you don't do this thoroughly, carefully and systematically, you might as well not do it at all. Because if you decide to stop at this point you may draw conclusions which are wholly inaccurate, and which could affect your health for years. Just take it slow, decide on a way of doing this, and then stick to that way.
 

You have convinced me. Therefore, given the amount of testing required, and the care required, I will adopt radio silence on this issue while conducting a proper experiment. I will report back when the exhaustive experiment is finished, which obviously could take quite a while.

This forum is great. Even, in this case, concerning an issue that doesn't have anything to do with diabetes except tangentially. (As diabetics we have a strong interest in cardio-vascular health.)

Thank you.
 
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Your radio silence will do my BP good. It gets a break from reading ‘No coffee’!
 
Grateful said:
Breaking radio silence just to post this link (seven cups of coffee a day reduces mortality risk!): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...fee-day-cuts-risk-early-death-study-suggests/.
Click to expand...

Sorry to rain on your parade but one of the researchers from Southampton was just on the BBC news saying that that might not be the case. That the studies just had too many variables in them to be able to say that coffee is good for us. The 'suggests' bit is the important part of the above link it seems.

They don't know what kind of coffee, how much coffee etc etc
 
He's just been on the telly again and apparently they can't say that drinking coffee is is good for our health especially when it's drunk with CREAM............... and other things such as sugar and syrups.
 
woodywhippet61 said:
Sorry to rain on your parade but one of the researchers from Southampton was just on the BBC news saying that that might not be the case.
Click to expand...

Just about every "study" done in my lifetime that claims something is "good for you" or "bad for you" needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt, apparently.

Anyway, my coffee experiment is now in abeyance because of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. For those among us who are U.S.-based: Happy Thanksgiving!

(For what it's worth, the four coffee-free days went like this: first day, no difference in BP, it was similar to when I was drinking coffee. Days 2, 3 and 4: substantial drop in average blood pressure; averaged over those three days with nine readings, it is 125/85 for those coffee-free days. I have now resumed coffee and will run a total of three cycles of this experiment, so it will take another two or three weeks: 3 days of coffee, followed by 4 days without, rinse and repeat. Then I will have some "scientific" conclusions.)
 
I have one cup of coffee a day. This is because caffeine makes my body react as if I had had mild-medium stress event. I know that stress events put my blood sugars up, so I sort of theorise that its not good for my diabetes.

That Adrenalin rush from good coffee seems, in me, to mimic the fight or flight response. And then i get a spike in my sugar levels.
 
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