High blood pressure is among the most widespread and serious health problems. It can lead to heart attack and stroke, yet alarmingly, the majority of sufferers display no warning signs.
If you have high blood pressure, your heart is under increased stress. As the pressure of blood places strain on arteries, the heart is forced to compensate by pumping more vigorously to circulate blood around the body. Healthy habits like eating a healthy diet, exercise and avoiding smoking can help manage and preventing the condition — all perfectly sound advice, but somewhat vague.
Thankfully, one heart specialist has clarified the steps that can be taken to maintain a healthy blood pressure.
Dr Sanjay Gupta recently joined the ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast to explore the daily changes that address the core of the issue. According to the prominent American cardiologist, elevated blood pressure is your body’s “scream for help”.
How to prevent and treat high blood pressure with your diet
The heart specialist identified sleep, stress, activity, and diet as the four foundations of wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, enhancing these aspects of existence won’t merely benefit your blood pressure, they’ll improve virtually every aspect of your health.
Admittedly, stress is difficult to measure and impossible to eradicate. It’s more straightforward to change what you eat, he noted.
“Food is something that people can make a change to. I think exercise, cardiovascular exercise is important, but people are becoming more conscious of exercise, and they are doing more. But all those things you cannot do lots of exercise and then be really proud that you can get away with four hours of sleep every night. You have to do it all.”
When questioned about the recommendations he’d offer a patient suffering from high blood pressure, Dr Gupta provided some straightforward yet significant dietary guidance.
“I personally think sugar is the enemy. Because sugar causes a bunch of insulin spikes, whereas a lot of blood pressure is about cut down salt. Yeah, cut down salt.”
Rather than simply advising “eat less salt”, Dr Gupta suggested an alternative approach to lowering your consumption. Cutting back on ultra processed foods is an indirect solution.
He said: “Reducing salt is good, but actually the salt isn’t where I guess I would think it is, which is adding lots of salt at the table. This is mainly in heavily processed food, so it’s sort of hiding in a lot of these meals and sort of ready meals and things like that. So actually, if you can cut back on that, I can still add, you know, salt to the eggs that I make at home without feeling so bad.”
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
