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Disease & Conditions

High Blood Pressure

Choose Your Food Carefully And Lower Your Blood Pressure

High Blood Pressure:

Figures show that there are nearly 73 million adults in the United States alone today suffering from high blood pressure and that over 50,000 individuals will die as a result of the condition during the next year. Sadly, many of these deaths could be prevented and one of the simplest and quickest ways to lower your blood pressure is to change your eating habits.

There have been dramatic changes in our lives in the last few years and one especially significant change for nearly all of us is seen in our diet. The times of three home-cooked meals a day have gone and have been largely replaced with convenience foods and fast food which has resulted in a raft of different problems including the growing problems of obesity and high blood pressure. Happily, this is a situation which can be easily and quickly reversed.

There are two main difficulties with most convenience and fast foods and they are salt and fat, both of which increase your blood pressure.

Salt is added to an enormous range of food during processing to add flavor and to act as a preservative and your daily salt intake can be very high without even adding further salt to your food at the dinner table. Canned foods in particular normally contain high levels of salt as do pizza and frozen dinners, so look closely at the label and determine precisely how much salt (sodium) products have in them before you buy them. Your overall daily intake of sodium should be as low as you can get it but should not exceed 2,400 milligrams which is equivalent to about a teaspoonful.

Fat is another enemy when it comes to high blood pressure and, although some fat in the diet is good for you, you should avoid high fat food whenever possible. As well as fats and oils themselves (like butter, lard, margarine, vegetable oil and meat dripping) a lot of our favorite foods are high in fat. Watch out for foods like cream, cakes, whole milk, regular ground beef, fried chicken, cookies, bacon, sausages, french fries, corned beef, nuts, salami, ice cream, pastries and nearly all fast foods.

At this point you might well be thinking that this list of food items covers just about everything you eat and that if you cut all of these out of your diet you will starve to death. The good news is that this is far from the case and that the choice of foods open to you is extensive. There are two ways to address the problem.

The first method is to merely replace items in your current diet with foods which are lower in salt or fat. For instance, you could replace normal full-fat milk with half-fat or semi-skimmed milk and regular ground beef with lean ground beef.

The second method is to introduce new food items into your diet and to replace some of your current favorite high fat foods. For instance, add more fresh fruit and vegetables into your meal plan and replace french fries with boiled or baked potatoes and rather than frying your food {try grilling|grill it. Not only is grilled fish and meat far better for you but it also tastes delicious.

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

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 that lower blood pressure