What Is Considered High Blood Pressure

What you put in your body has a huge impact on your blood pressure. If you’re eating the wrong foods, your cholesterol will increase and your heart will have to work much harder to get blood and oxygen to your body’s cells. On the other hand, the right foods will nourish your heart while unclogging your arteries, resulting in lower blood pressure and a healthier body.

Here are 7 diet tips for high blood pressure.

Reduce Sodium Intake

Sodium is the enemy of a healthy heart. Although it’s easy to put less salt in your home cooking, it’s also important to look at the labels of various foods in the grocery stores. It’s generally safe to assume that restaurant food has a lot of salt, as chefs generally optimize for taste rather than health.

Cut Out Caffeine

Caffeine causes spikes and drops in blood pressure. It over-stimulates the heart for a short period of time, then causes a caffeine drop. Putting your heart and arteries through this roller coaster on a daily basis is very dangerous for someone with high blood pressure.

Eat More Fruits and Veggies

Fruits and vegetables give your body the minerals and nutrition it needs to build healthy heart tissues. They also help detoxify the body. Most of the body’s toxins are stored in fat cells. By reducing the amount of toxins in your body, you’ll also reduce the amount of fat your body has to retain in order to safely keep toxins out of the blood stream.

Eat Potassium

Potassium is a mineral that helps the body keep a regular blood pressure. It’s found in fruits like bananas and cantaloupes, as well as zucchini and spinach. Make sure you’re getting enough potassium.

Avoid All High Fat Foods

High fat foods, especially trans-fats, saturated fats and hydrogenated fats are very bad for the heart. They cause clogging of arteries which eventually results in higher blood pressure.

If you regularly have high fat foods, just cutting them out of your diet can have a huge impact on your blood pressure.

Eliminate Empty Sugar

Candies, chocolate and cola al contain a lot of empty sugar. Empty sugar first starts out as a burst of hyper energy in the body, but is often turned into fat as the body can’t handle all the calories pumped into your system.

Cola in particular contains a lot of sugar and usually a lot of caffeine as well. Empty sugars of all sorts should be cut from the diet.

Try the DASH Diet

The DASH diet is a special diet formulated just for lowering blood pressure. It’s based on a 2,000 calorie daily diet, meaning you’ll be able to get more than enough to eat, but from foods that actually nourish the body rather than from empty calories.