high blood pressure and your diet

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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

I have high blood pressure and I can tell you from first hand experience that a high blood pressure diet is probably the most effective way at controlling, and possibly even eliminating, high blood pressure. We will talk about what foods you can avoid to help enhance your high blood pressure diet in a while, but for now let us just stick with the most basic information. If you have high blood pressure then the most effective way to deal with it is to consult your doctor, listen to your doctor, and get on a high blood pressure diet. While what you eat does matter in creating an effective high blood pressure diet, just losing weight on any diet should be an effective control for high blood pressure.

The first thing your doctor will tell you after you have been diagnosed you with high blood pressure is that you need to develop an exercise routine and a high blood pressure diet in order to get your blood pressure under control. Your doctor may also prescribe a treatment using medicines to also help control your high blood pressure but, in the end, the thing you can do to help yourself the most is get on a high blood pressure diet and use that coupled with exercise to lose weight and control your high blood pressure.

A DASHing Diet

One of the more popular high blood pressure diets is the DASH diet. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension and it is promoted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood institute. Not unexpectedly the diet calls for a decrease in the patient?s intake of sodium. Sodium is primarily found in salt but it also occurs naturally in many foods and the Institute provides a list of foods that need to be controlled in order to limit sodium intake. The plan does not call for the patient to become a vegetarian but it does reduce the intake of red meats.

The DASH diet calls for the patient to find more healthy alternatives to junk food and makes the recommendation that the patient eliminate the intake of processed foods completely. The Institute provides guidance on these topics and also provides advice on healthy alternatives to junk food. The DASH diet focuses on changing the lifestyle of the patient to include the increased intake of foods more rich in calcium, protein, and potassium. It is a complete lifestyle change and one of the hardest things to change is a person?s eating habits even if it does mean lowering high blood pressure.

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