High blood pressure can have disastrous consequences on our health. Often, high blood pressure occurs in overweight people who smoke and are sedentary and that combination puts them at risk for a host of serious complications health wise. The causes of high blood pressure are complex, but addressing the underlying reasons is easy, as long as you know what the lifestyle changes are that you need to make to head in the right direction for addressing your hypertension.
After all, it is one of the biggest increasing risk factors in a number of health issues that can potentially end you life and severely debilitate you, like strokes and heart disease. Hypertension can be genetically inherited which puts you at risk from birth. It also can result from dietary components or other factors such as excess weight or habits like smoking. Reduction of salt intake is important to people with hypertension.
Our entire pattern of Western eating is conducive to the development of high blood pressure. Our diets consist of heavy meat consumption and a high use of processed foods with a high proportion of salt and sugar. Use of salt, sugar, smoking and coffee drinking have a significant association with elevated blood pressure. Eliminating or curbing these habits in your lifestyle will have a positive effect on your blood pressure readings.
Decreasing the amount of meat and high fat dairy products in your diet should help to reduce your risk of elevated blood pressure. Increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet should help to avoid a problem with hypertension. Not only can decreasing meat and dairy (high fat dairy, low fat is actually healthy for you) help your hypertension, but it can also help with preventing different types of cancers and digestive health issues like IBS and slow digestion.
If you already have hypertension, certainly you need to be under the care of a physician. There are many different medications to control your blood pressure. You should still address the hypertension from a dietary and lifestyle approach in addition to your medications. If you don’t know your blood pressure, you should have it checked as it is often without symptoms until something disastrous happens to your health. Dropping unwanted pounds and increasing your physical activity level will help to keep your blood pressure controlled. Relaxation techniques and meditation can help to lower blood pressure readings also.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Natural and Herbal Treatments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.