Raena Morgan: Hello, I’m Raena Morgan with iHealthTube visiting with Robert Kowalski. He is the author of The Blood Pressure Cure. And Bob in your book, you have a chapter that’s devoted to the secret weapons in the fight against high blood pressure. Let’s start with talking about one, it’s an amino acid. Tell us more. Robert Kowalski: Well, Raena when I first started writing this book and doing the research, I looked for natural approaches to lowering blood pressure and there was substantial literature backing up the idea that this amino acid called Argenine could lower blood pressure, but there was a big problem behind it. In order to get the effect, people would have to be on a continuous IV drip. In other words, it had to be in the bloodstream on a continuous level. If you were to simply take a tablet of ordinary Argenine, it wouldn’t give that benefit. But when you were on that drip, it really reduced the pressure and increased the amount of flow to the muscle of the heart to keep it healthier and beating well. So the difficulty was this, how do we get Argenine to be an efficient additive or a supplement to use in the diet? A number of companies have now made this available as a sustained release. So gradually, it releases into the bloodstream and keeps that level up so we have the benefits so that blood pressure can be reduced throughout the entire day. Now, how did they come up with this? Raena Morgan: That’s what I’d like to know, yes. Robert Kowalski: It turns out that in about the mid-90s even, before them, early 90s about 1993, 1994, doctors started to observe that something was going on on the inside of the artery. Something was being made actually in the endothelium, that’s the lining of the artery, and when that was released, there was a relaxation of the artery itself and blood pressure fell, heart rate fell. It was a pleasure to behold, but they had no idea what it was because it was manufactured, worked, and was gone in a nanosecond. Raena Morgan: That’s what you said, yes. Robert Kowalski: They couldn’t figure it out. They had no idea what they were looking at so they called it EDRF, Endothelium Derived Relaxation Factor and that was actually the way it was in the literature for years. Then a trio of doctors discovered that EDRF was a gas called nitric oxide. That won them the Nobel Prize. Raena Morgan: Excellent. Robert Kowalski: And it was found then that the amino acid Argenine is the building block for nitric oxide. So as we increase the amount of Argenine that’s available for the arteries to use on a regular basis throughout the day, the more nitric oxide gets made. And the more nitric oxide, the lower the blood pressure by relaxing those arteries. It’s one of my secret weapons. Raena Morgan: And what a remedy, you know. Robert Kowalski: An easy thing, too, because after all, an amino acid is nothing more than a building block of protein, in this case, the building block of a gas that’s beneficial for the body. Naturally derived so there are zero side effects as compared with those prescription drugs that we’d probably want to avoid. Raena Morgan: Alright. Thank you very much, Bob. We’ll have to come back and visit and talk about some of your other secret weapons. Robert Kowalski: Let’s do that. Raena Morgan: Alright. Robert Kowalski: Good.