Choose Your Food With Care And Lower Your Blood Pressure

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
Comment this article

Figures show that there are approximately 73 million adults in the US alone today suffering from high blood pressure and that in excess of 50,000 individuals will die as a result of this problem during the next year. Unhappily, a large number of these deaths are preventable and one of the easiest and fastest ways to reduce your blood pressure is to adjust your diet.

There have been significant changes in our lifestyles in recent years and one especially significant change for a lot of us is seen in the food we eat. Those times of enjoying three square home-cooked meals every day are long gone and have been replaced by to a large extend by convenience foods and fast food which has caused various different problems including the increasing problems of both obesity and high blood pressure. Happily, this is one state of affairs that it is very simple to reverse.

Convenience and fast foods present two main problems and they are salt and fat, both of which have been shown to raise your blood pressure.

Salt is added to a very large range of food during processing to both add flavor and to act as a preservative ...
... and your daily consumption of salt can be very high without even adding salt to your meals at the table. Canned foods in particular frequently contain high levels of salt as do frozen dinners and pizza, so look closely at the labeling 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 possible but ought not to exceed 2,400 milligrams which is equivalent to about a teaspoonful.

Another adversary when it comes to high blood pressure is fat and, while a bit of fat in the diet is healthy, you should stay away from high fat food whenever you can. As well as fats and oils themselves (such as butter, vegetable oil, lard, margarine and meat dripping) a lot of our favorite foods are high in fat. look out for foods such as cream, cream cheese, cakes, pastries, nuts, cheddar, corned beef, ice cream, french fries, pies, cookies, salami, fried chicken, regular ground beef and almost all fast foods.

Now at this point you may well be thinking that this list covers just about everything you eat and that if you cut all this out you will starve to death. The good news is that nothing could be farther from the truth and that the range of foods open to you is enormous. There are two ways to deal with this problem.

The first method is to merely replace items in your present diet with foods that are lower in salt or fat. For example, 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 foods into your diet and to replace some of your current favorite high fat foods. For example, add more fresh fruit and vegetables into your meal plan and replace french fries with baked potatoes and rather than frying food {try grilling|grill it. Not only is grilled fish and meat much better for you but it also tastes very good.

High blood pressure really does not need to be a problem for most individuals and a few simply changes to what we eat can resolve the problem very easily and very quickly.