A Guide to High Blood Pressure Prevention

By Sean Davids

Preventing high blood pressure is extremely important as this condition can raise your likelihood of developing heart problems. Your blood pressure is impacted by your health, family history and diet. In order to prevent high blood pressure you should try to follow a healthy lifestyle and exercise on a regular basis. It's also important to watch what you eat.

There have been a few diets developed to help you prevent high blood pressure by eating foods that keep your blood pressure low, called the Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH). This DASH diet centers on low fat dairy, vegetables, low cholesterol foods, low fat foods and fruits. The suggested foods include whole grains, nuts, poultry and fish.

There is another diet called the DASH-sodium diet, as your sodium intake affects your blood pressure. This diet limits your sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams a day. Research has shown that reducing your sodium intake can help control high blood pressure.

Many other factors such as being overweight can also create high blood pressure. You can prevent high blood pressure by losing a small amount of weight, such as ten pounds or so. Besides reducing high blood pressure, losing weight also reduces the probability of developing cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol and diabetes. Losing weight has a great range of health rewards.

You can lose weight by doing more exercise and this also helps in preventing high blood pressure. Exercise works the heart and the more you work out the lower your resting heart rate. You don't have to go crazy; simply work up slowly to a minimum of 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week. You will want to switch the exercises that you do to keep it interesting.

By drinking a lot of alcohol you increase the pressure in your blood. You want to keep your alcohol consumption to a moderate amount, such as one drink a day for women and two for men. One drink is 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1 ounce of whiskey or other liquor. Alcohol can also make it difficult to lose weight so you will want to limit your consumption for more than one reason.

Smoking also leads to high blood pressure and if you are a smoker then you need to quit in order to prevent high blood pressure. You can bring your blood pressure back to normal in a year merely by quitting smoking. - 32389

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