Reduce Your Blood Pressure By Simply Eating The Right Foods

It is estimated that there are about 73 million adults in the US alone today who are suffering from high blood pressure and that more than 50,000 individuals will die as a result of this condition during the course of this year. Unhappily, a large number of these deaths are preventable and one of the easiest and fastest ways to lower your blood pressure is to adjust your eating habits.

We have witnessed significant changes in our lives in recent years and one especially significant change for a lot of us is seen in the food we eat. The days of enjoying three home-cooked meals each day have gone and have been replaced by to a large extend by convenience foods and fast food which has led to a number of different problems including the increasing problems of obesity and high blood pressure. Luckily, this is one state of affairs that can be easily reversed.

There are two major problems with most convenience and fast foods and these are fat and salt, both of which have been clearly proven to increase your blood pressure.

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

Fat is another adversary when it comes to high blood pressure and, while a bit of fat in the diet is good for you, high fat food ought to be avoided whenever possible. As well as fats and oils themselves (such as butter, margarine, lard, vegetable oil and meat dripping) many of our favorite foods are high in fat. Watch out for foods such as cream, pies, nuts, fried chicken, cream cheese, whole milk, cakes, corned beef, cheddar, salami, sausages, cookies and almost all fast foods.

At this point you might be thinking that this list of food items covers just about everything you eat and that if you cut all this out you are going to starve to death. Well, the good news is that this is far from the case and that the choice of foods open to you is enormous. There are two ways to deal with this problem.

The first is to merely replace items in your current diet with food items that are lower in salt or fat. For example, you might replace normal full-fat milk with semi-skimmed or half-fat milk and regular ground beef with lean ground beef.

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

High blood pressure does not have to be a problem for most of us and some simply changes to what we eat can resolve the problem very easily and very quickly.

TheBloodPressureCenter.com provides information and advice of all aspects of controlling your blood pressure including choosing the best blood pressure monitors for use at home to selecting foods that lower blood pressure