By phileasfog on March 3rd, 2009

Eight Ways to Get Your Blood Pressure Down

You don’t have to eat bland vegetables for every meal to get your blood pressure down! These tips will help you understand what foods are bad for you so you can moderate yourself.

Learn your daily allowances! Check guidelines in your country (i.e. FDA) and keep them in the front of your mind. Saturated fats and salt are your biggest enemy. Unsaturated (normal) fats and sugar are bad but the recommended doses are much easier to keep to, try not to swap saturated fats and salt for sugar as you’ll then put yourself at risk of diabetes.

Some macdonalds meals are only half your allowances but some take-out food cannot be eaten at all without exceeding your allowances in one meal. Pizza is especally bad, just three slices of a large you-know-who pizza is your daily allowance of everything bad. The levels of nutrition for all major take out chains are on their websites.
Start reading packets and read them carefully. Big Grocery stores will deliberately use confusing units when giving information i.e. “1/2 of a packet” when a packet is a meal for one or “per 100g” of a 383g meal.

They will state the sodium (50% salt) levels instead of the salt levels or gather all of the fat types together, saturated fat is the worst and has its own allowance. Don’t be tempted to buy anything that completely misses something off the label i.e. no salt = bad salt.
Lose weight! Fat applies a lot of pressure to your internal organs and veigns/arteries, fat around the waist applies pressure directly to your internal organs while you sleep.

30 minutes exercise four times a week. No! 15 minutes exercise 8 times a week is not the same. As a rule of thumb, you should be drenched in sweat unless its minus ten outside. Cardio-vascular exercise is the fastest way to achieve real exhaustion, you’re trying to burn off the fats in your blood and then some, ‘then some’ being the key! Don’t overdo it though, 30 minutes of steady exercise is healthier than burning out quickly because your heart is racing.
Booze contains salt! Certain brands of whiskey and beer are flavoured using salt. There are a lot of good web sites documenting the levels of salt including brand specific information.
Which brings me to – Stop drinking! Alcohol immediately raises your blood pressure. Besides, drinking five pints of beer is like eating five doughnuts – you just wouldn’t do it knowing that you need to look after yourself. This is where you can make the biggest impact on your health by cutting back.
If you’re smoking, Stop! Nicotine restricts the arteries and instantly raises your blood pressure, not to mention the other 5,000 chemicals who’s dangers are not fully comprehended.

Smoking slows your bodies whole metabolism and losing weight will be a lot harder.
Coffee is bad! Coffee is a stimulant, it artificially raises your heartbeat and blood pressure to keep you awake. Just getting enough sleep is a much better substitute, your body will resurrect itself after an hour or two of feeling sleepy; let it! Tea also contains small amounts of caffeine, so does coke, other soft drinks and several different herbal drinks.

Research alternatives properly, for example, liquorice tea raises your blood pressure and is not recommended for hypertension. “Red Bush” or Rooibos is a great alternative, it still contains tanin but this does nothing for your blood pressure. Milk contains a moderate amount of salt so herbal teas that are great without milk are recommended.
If all else fails, buy a blood pressure monitor.

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes you just can’t figure out what is raising your blood pressure, a $30 blood pressure monitor can give you accurate readings and really help if you measure your blood pressure a couple of times per day especially either side of eating large meals.