High blood pressure can often be prevented or reduced by eating healthily, maintaining a healthy weight, taking regular exercise, drinking alcohol in moderation and not smoking. Cut down on the amount of salt in your food and eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. The Eatwell Guide highlights the different types of food that make up our diet, and shows the proportions we should eat them in to have a well-balanced and healthy diet. Salt raises your blood pressure. The more salt you eat, the higher your blood pressure. Aim to eat less than 6g (0.2oz) of salt a day, which is about a teaspoonful. Find out how to cut down on salt Eating a low-fat diet that includes lots of fibre, such as wholegrain rice, bread and pasta, and plenty of fruit and vegetables also helps lower blood pressure. Aim to eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables every day. Find out how to get your 5 A Day Regularly drinking too much alcohol can raise your blood pressure over time. Staying within the recommended levels is the best way to reduce your risk of developing high blood pressure: Find out how many units are in your favourite drink and get tips on cutting down. Alcohol is also high in calories, which will make you gain weight and can further increase your blood pressure. Being overweight forces your heart to work harder to pump blood around your body, which can raise your blood pressure. Find out if you need to lose weight
with the BMI healthy weight calculator If you do need to lose some weight, it's worth remembering that just losing a few pounds will make a big difference to your blood pressure and overall health. Get advice on losing weight safely Being active and taking regular
exercise lowers blood pressure by keeping your heart and blood vessels in good condition. Regular exercise can also help you lose weight, which will also help lower your blood pressure. Adults should do at least 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, such as cycling or fast walking, every week. Physical activity can include anything from sport to walking and gardening. Drinking more than 4 cups of coffee a day may increase your blood pressure. If you're a big fan of coffee, tea or other caffeine-rich drinks, such as cola and some energy drinks, consider cutting down. It's fine to drink tea and coffee as part of a balanced diet, but it's important that these drinks are not your main or
only source of fluid. Smoking does not directly cause high blood pressure, but it puts you at much higher risk of a heart attack and stroke. Smoking, like high blood pressure, will cause your arteries to narrow. If you smoke and have high blood pressure, your arteries will narrow much more quickly, and your risk of heart or lung disease in the
future is dramatically increased. Get help to stop smoking Page last reviewed: 23 October 2019 10 tips for using diet to control blood pressure.Fiddling with diet to control cholesterol makes perfect sense. After all, some of the cholesterol that ends up in arteries starts out in food. Changing your diet to control blood pressure doesn't seem quite so straightforward. Yet food can have a direct and sometimes dramatic effect on blood pressure. Salt certainly plays a role. But there is far more to a blood pressure–friendly diet than minimizing salt intake. Fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy foods, beans, nuts, whole-grain carbohydrates, and unsaturated fats also have healthful effects on blood pressure. There isn't a single "magic" food in this list. Instead, it's the foundation for an all-around healthful eating strategy that is good for blood pressure and so much more. Rigorous trials show that eating strategies such as the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, DASH variants like the OmniHeart diet, and Mediterranean-type diets lower blood pressure in people with hypertension (high blood pressure) and those headed in that direction. They also help prevent some of the feared consequences of high blood pressure. Why bother?Hypertension is the ultimate stealth condition. You'd never know you have it without having your blood pressure measured — or until high blood pressure begins to damage vital organs. Half of the 65 million American adults with high blood pressure don't have it under control. That's worrisome given the insidious consequences of high blood pressure. It is the leading cause of stroke in the United States. It contributes to thousands of heart attacks. It overworks heart muscle, leading to heart failure. It damages the kidneys, erodes sight, interferes with memory, puts a damper on sexual activity, and steals years of life.
10 tipsDrugs that lower blood pressure tend to work well. But they don't necessarily attack the cause of the problem. And no matter how safe they are, all drugs can have some unwanted or unintended side effects. A healthful diet is an effective first-line defense for preventing high blood pressure. It is an excellent initial treatment when blood pressure creeps into the unhealthy zone, and a perfect partner for medications. Unfortunately, translating the dietary strategies tested in clinical trials into diets for daily life hasn't been easy. Here’s evidence-based advice about diet and blood pressure, complete with a weekly shopping list (see below):
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