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High blood pressure is a serious condition that can lead to fatal complications. Essentially, high blood pressure, or hypertension, occurs when the pressure inside your circulatory system rises to a dangerous level. Your circulatory system is a lot like the plumbing system in your house. Your heart is a pump, moving blood throughout the arteries (like water through pipes). To do its job properly, it needs a constant pressure.
If the pressure gets too high, it puts a strain on everything in the system. Eventually, this pressure causes things to break down. In your house, this can lead to burst faucets, but in your body, it can lead to heart failure or aneurysms.
The best way to control your blood pressure is to eat a good high blood pressure diet, focused on eliminating the kinds of foods that lead to hypertension and promoting overall good health. So, what’s a good high blood pressure diet? And what other steps can you take to reduce your risk of high blood pressure?
What Does A Good High Blood Pressure Diet Look Like
The biggest dietary contributor to high blood pressure is probably sodium. Though research has in recent years challenged the idea that regular table salt is bad for your blood pressure, the majority of evidence suggests that a diet high in sodium contributes to hypertension. Your body regulates the supply of water in your body by passing the water you drink through the kidneys. The kidneys use this water to flush toxins out of your bloodstream and send the rest to the bladder to be passed as urine.
The kidneys use this water to flush toxins out of your bloodstream and send the rest to the bladder to be passed as urine. But to do this effectively, it needs the right balance of sodium. Too much sodium in the blood forces your body to retain water, which elevates the blood pressure and puts stress on nearly every organ in the body.
So the first thing you want to do when it comes to eating a good high blood is to keep your sodium levels within the recommended limits. Most experts suggest that you want to keep your daily sodium intake at less than 1,500 mg. However, the average American consumes around 3,000 mg, at least twice as much as recommended. The biggest culprit in elevated sodium levels is processed food. Most forms of processed food like potato chips or cheap, frozen dinners are very high in sodium. Cutting these sorts of things out of your diet and going to fresh, home-cooked meals is a much more effective way to eat a good high blood pressure diet than simply passing on the salt shaker.
But even freshly cooked meals can contain dangerous levels of sodium if you’re eating the wrong things. Avoid ingredients that are smoked or cured. The curing process for meats like salami, bacon, and ham involves covering the meat with salt and thus, these types of foods are very high in sodium.
In the same way, anything that comes from a can is likely to have high levels of sodium. Canned ravioli, carrots, olives, peas, and salted nuts all have large amounts of sodium and should be avoided. Ditch any type of bread you found in the frozen section of the grocery store like oven-ready pizzas.
Look for low sodium alternatives to some of your favorite products, many companies have begun to offer them in response to public health concerns. And try to eat fresh meats and vegetables.
Other Things You Can Do
In addition to eating a healthy diet, exercise is an important part of maintaining good blood pressure. You’ve no doubt heard that before, but what you might not have heard is just how effective exercises is for lowering your blood pressure.
You don’t have to start running marathons to get healthy. It turns out that just going on a walk for about 30 minutes a day is enough to lower your blood pressure by 4 to 9 milligrams. Just remember to keep up with that daily exercise. IF you stop exercising, your blood pressure will likely begin to rise again.
The other benefit of regular exercise is that it helps you lose weight. Being just a few pounds overweight raises your risk of developing high blood pressure significantly, so losing that extra weight and keeping it off is one of the best ways to keep your blood pressure at healthy levels.
Managing your blood pressure is just part of good overall health and staying healthy is the best thing you can do to yourself. As everyone always says, good health is something you don’t appreciate until it’s gone. So maintain a good high blood pressure diet and protect it.
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