Heart Disease Symptoms

It is estimated that there are approximately 73 million adults in the US alone today who are suffering from high blood pressure and that in excess of 50 thousand people will die as a result of this problem during the next year. Unhappily, many of these deaths are preventable and one of the easiest and fastest ways to reduce your blood pressure is to alter your diet.

We have witnessed major changes in our lives in the past few years and one particularly significant change for a lot of us is seen in the food we eat. The times of enjoying three home-cooked meals each day have gone and have been replaced by to a large extend by convenience foods and fast food which has led to various different problems including the increasing problems of both obesity and high blood pressure. Fortunately, this is one situation which it is very simple to reverse.

Convenience and fast foods carry two main problems and these are fat and salt, both of which increase your blood pressure.

Salt is added to an extremely large number of food during the manufacturing and packaging process to both add flavor and act as a preservative and your daily intake of salt can be enormous without even adding further salt to your meals at the table. Canned foods in particular normally contain very high levels of salt as do frozen dinners and pizza, so look closely at the labeling and determine precisely how much salt (sodium) products contain before you pick them. Your overall daily intake of salt should be as low as you can get it but should not be more than 2,400 milligrams which is about a teaspoonful.

Another enemy when it comes to high blood pressure is fat and, while a bit of fat in your food is good for you, high fat food should be avoided wherever you can. As well as fats and oils themselves (such as butter, margarine, vegetable oil, lard and meat dripping) many of our favorite foods are very high in fat. Keep an eye out for foods such as cream, cookies, ice cream, cream cheese, bacon, salami, whole milk, cakes, fried chicken, regular ground beef, corned beef, cheddar, nuts, pastries and almost all fast foods.

At this stage you may well be thinking that this list covers just about everything you eat and that if you cut all of these out you are going to starve to death. Well, the good news is that this is far from the case and that the range of foods still open to you is enormous. There are two ways to go about solving this problem.

The first method is to merely replace items in your current diet with foods which are lower in salt or fat. For example, replace normal 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 rather than frying food {try grilling|grill it. Grilled fish and meat is not only far better for you but it also tastes very good.

High blood pressure really does not have to be a problem for the majority of people and some simply changes to the way we eat can solve the problem very easily and very quickly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under Heart Disease, heart disease info, heart disease statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.