Eating Right Can Reduce Your Blood Pressure
I am a regular blood donor and always record what my blood pressure was. The last two have been a bit high (stress as I prepare to move?) but my normal blood pressure is usually quite close to 120/80. Pulse is usually close to 60. In these two respects I seem to be a healthy 50-something.
Unfortunately, as our guest writer, Donald Saunders, says, over 20% of Americans have high blood pressure. Read along with me to see what this means and what you can do about your blood pressure.
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Figures show that there are some 73 million adults in the United States alone today who are suffering from high blood pressure and that more than 50,000 individuals will die as a direct result of the condition during the next year. Unhappily, many of these deaths are unnecessary and one of the quickest and easiest ways to lower your blood pressure is to alter your eating habits.
We have witnessed dramatic changes in our lives in the past few years and one very significant change for nearly all of us is seen in our diet. The days of three square home-cooked meals a day have gone and have been replaced by to a large extend with convenience foods and fast food which has resulted in various different problems including the rising problems of both obesity and high blood pressure. Fortunately, this is a state of affairs that can be easily and quickly reversed.
There are two major problems with most convenience and fast foods and these are salt and fat, both of which increase your blood pressure.
Salt is added to a huge range of food during the manufacturing and packaging process to both add flavor and to act as a preservative and your daily consumption of salt can be extremely high without you adding salt to your food at the dinner table. Canned foods in particular frequently contain very high levels of salt as do frozen dinners and pizza, so look closely at the label and see just how much salt (sodium) products have in them before you buy them. Your total daily intake of salt should be as low as you can get it but ought not to be more than 2,400 milligrams which is about a teaspoonful.
Another enemy when it comes to high blood pressure is fat and, although a bit of fat in your food is healthy, you should steer clear of high fat food whenever possible. As well as fats and oils themselves (like butter, margarine, lard, vegetable oil and meat dripping) a lot of our favorite foods are very high in fat. Watch out for foods like cream, pies, nuts, pastries, regular ground beef, whole milk, ice cream, cookies, sausages, bacon, cream cheese, cakes, cheddar and nearly all fast foods.
At this point you might be thinking that this list contains almost everything you eat and that if you cut all of these out you are going to starve to death. Well, the good news is that this is far from the case and that the range of foods still open to you is extensive. There are two ways to address the problem.
The first method is to just replace items in your current diet with food items that are lower in salt or fat. For instance, you might replace normal full-fat milk with semi-skimmed or half-fat milk and regular ground beef with lean ground beef.
The second method is to add new food items into your diet and to replace some of your current favorite high fat foods. For instance, add more fresh vegetables and fruit into your meal plan and replace french fries with boiled potatoes and instead of frying your food {try grilling|grill it. Not only is grilled meat and fish much better for you but it also tastes delicious.
High blood pressure does not need to be a problem for most individuals and some simply changes to what we eat can solve the problem very quickly and very easily.
Author Resource:-> TheBloodPressureCenter.com provides information and advice of all aspects of controlling your blood pressure including choosing the best blood pressure monitor for use at home to selecting foods to lower blood pressure
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