We have witnessed major changes in our lifestyles in recent years and one particularly significant change for most of us is seen in our diet. Those days of enjoying three home-cooked meals each day are long gone and have been largely replaced by convenience and fast foods which has led to a number of different problems including the growing problems of obesity and high blood pressure. Luckily, this is a state of affairs that it is very easy to reverse.
Convenience and fast foods present two main problems and these are salt and fat, both of which increase your blood pressure.
Salt is added to an extremely large number of food during the manufacturing and packaging process to add flavor and act as a preservative and your daily intake of salt can be very high without you adding 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 see precisely how much salt (sodium) products have in them before you buy them. Your overall daily intake of sodium should be as low as possible but ought not to exceed 2,400 milligrams which is about a teaspoonful.
Fat is another enemy when it comes to high blood pressure and, while a little bit of fat in your food is good for you, you should steer clear of high fat food wherever possible. In addition to fats and oils themselves (like butter, vegetable oil, margarine, lard and meat dripping) a lot of our favorite foods are high in fat. look out for foods like cream, whole milk, cookies, sausages, ice cream, cheddar, corned beef, french fries, pastries, pies, fried chicken, nuts, regular ground beef, cream cheese, bacon, salami, cakes and nearly all fast foods.
Now at this stage you may well be thinking that this list of food items contains almost everything you eat and that if you cut all this out of your diet you will starve to death. 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 go about solving the problem.
The first method is to just replace items in your present diet with foods that are lower in salt or fat. For example, you might replace ordinary full-fat milk with half-fat or semi-skimmed milk and regular ground beef with lean ground beef.
The second method is to introduce new foods into your diet and replace some of your present favorite high fat foods. For example, add more fresh fruit and vegetables into your meal plan and replace french fries with boiled potatoes and instead of frying your food {try grilling|grill it. Grilled meat and fish is not only far better for you but it also tastes very good.
High blood pressure does not need to be a problem for the majority of us and a few simply changes to what we eat can resolve the problem quickly and easily.
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TheBloodPressureCenter.com provides information and advice of all aspects of controlling your blood pressure including choosing the best blood pressure monitor for use at home to selecting foods that lower blood pressure
