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Many people think that high blood pressure is a natural part of getting older. But it does not have to be that way. When you lower high blood pressure, you can cut the risk of heart disease and stroke in half or more. That may seem hard to believe. After all, you can have high blood pressure and still feel great. It is like when you blow up a balloon too much, you put too much pressure on a structure that is not built to take it. It pops. That is what high blood pressure does to your arteries. Under extra pressure, the plaque may rupture. As it breaks lose, it turns into the stuff clots are made of, and your risk of heart attacks and stroke rises. If your kidneys are not working right, they can produce hormones to tighten the blood vessels, constricting the arteries, and putting on the pressure. Stress can be another common cause of increased constriction of the blood vessels. Here are some tips that you can consider to take off the pressure.

1. Reduce Fat Intake

Most people’s daily calories come from fat. To lower the high blood pressure and get your cholesterol down, it is recommended to get your fat consumption down to 10 percent of calories to reverse heart disease. Get into the habit of checking the labels on processed food, they will fill you in on the fat content.

2. Get Active

Physical activity lowers the high blood pressure. If you are not doing anything, start to do something physical. Just accumulate 30 minutes of activity a day. This need not be marathon running. You can walk, ride an exercise bicycle, work in the garden, or mow the lawn.

3. Up The Antioxidants

High blood pressure is caused, by part, by a shortage of disease-fighting antioxidants in your system. Free radicals, compounds that antioxidants disarm, block your body’s production of nitric oxide and prostacyclin, both of which relax blood vessels to help keep blood pressure down. You can get antioxidants through your diet by eating foods rich in beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, such as carrots, broccoli, and sweet potatoes.

4. Drop Some Pounds

Being overweight can contribute to high blood pressure. A weight loss of just 5 to 10 pounds can actually make blood pressure medication unnecessary in some cases.

5. Add The Potassium

Low potassium intake can also increase blood pressure. Get it from your diet such as fresh fruit and vegetables, particularly bananas and potatoes.

6. Lower Stress

Stress can get your heart pumping and your pressure rising. As stress raises your heart rate and blood pressure, hormones may make the coronary arteries constrict. The combination of reduced blood supply and greater demand for blood can lead to a heart attack.

7. Cut The Salt

As you get older, your system becomes more sensitive to salt and hangs on to it longer. Consuming 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams a day puts you in the low-salt and high-health range. So check those nutrition labels when you shop and look for no-salt or low-salt products.

About the Author: Raymond Lee is one of the foremost experts in the health and fitness industry and is the Founder of Bodyfixes Group specializing in body health, muscle development and dieting. He is currently the author of the latest edition of “Neck Exercises and Workouts.” Visit http://www.bodyfixes.com for more information.
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Changes to our lifestyle and diet today mean that a growing number of people suffer from hypertension and it is crucial that we all monitor our blood pressure on a regular basis. Luckily this no longer means having to trek to the doctors surgery and the large range of simple to use and reasonably inexpensive monitors available today means that we can record our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. Nonetheless, whilst measuring our own pressure might be easy enough, understanding the resulting numbers is not always so easy.

Blood pressure will differ from one person to the next and also fluctuates with such things as what we eat and the time of day. Accordingly we are not able to say that normal blood pressure is a fixed set of numbers and that if you are more than a given number of either above or below these you need to see your doctor. What we are able to do however is to draw up a series of bands which denote varying degrees of low and high blood pressure in relation to a set of baseline readings which apply to the vast majority of the population and that is just what a blood pressure chart does.

A standard blood chart is a pictorial representation of a wide range of blood pressure readings below and above the norm with advice on what the bands tell you about your blood pressure.

For example, if you were to take a blood pressure reading and come up with a systolic reading of 135 and a diastolic reading of 86, it is quite possible that this will not mean very much to you, apart from the fact that it might appear a bit high. But, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart between the higher systolic reading on the left of the chart and the lower reading on the right of the chart you will discover that this line falls in a band which is slightly above normal and that, while it is approaching the borderline for hypertension, it is nevertheless still within an acceptable range.

Similarly, if you were to record a reading of 149 over 98 this would be classed as a mild case of hypertension. Nevertheless, the chart would also show that this reading on its own should not be a cause for worry and might simply result from taking your blood pressure first thing in the morning when pressure is frequently slightly raised or of measuring it shortly after eating something with a high fat content or which is salty.

Charts of this type are extremely helpful in providing you with a snapshot of the state of your pressure at a given moment but possibly a more useful chart would be a daily blood pressure chart which is plotted over a reasonable period of time.

The majority of modern blood pressure monitors have the ability to store your readings and they can either be printed out and plotted by hand on graph paper or can be used in conjunction with one of several widely available software programs to draw a colorful history of your blood pressure over the past few weeks.

Whichever method you choose there is no question that having a pictorial representation of your blood pressure readings over time can certainly make monitoring your health considerably easier. TheBloodPressureCenter.com provides information on home blood pressure monitors and on using a blood pressure chart

About the author: DONALD SAUNDERS
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I came across a phrase the other day whilst doing some research on some articles about high blood pressure and the phrase was “high blood pressure symptom in man”.

Now the phrase might be a slightly awkward phrase whilst looking at it from an English-language perspective and would certainly not be one of the search terms that I would definitely use but the key thing that really came to mind here in my mind was that it highlights how possibly confused and poorly served we are when it comes to trying to understand the various symptoms that we think might be indicative of high blood pressure.

Now writing as somebody who himself was diagnosed by accident with what is termed as “malignant hypertension” just over five years ago; I can well understand this paranoia in trying to spot symptoms at an earlier stage as is possible but the truth of the matter is that in the majority of cases this is just not possible.

Now to slightly backtrack here, let me be slightly more explicit as to what exactly malignant hypertension is. Now in the various stages or levels of hypertension, malignant hypertension is the worst. Now this is a sobering thought believe me and one that does tend to concentrate the mind slightly but fear not it isn’t as bad nowadays as it was 40 years.

Forty years ago if you were given a diagnosis of malignant hypertension then by and large your doctor may just as well have given you a death sentence. Given the fact that as far as most people are concerned the ideal level for blood pressure or hypertension is what they call 120/80 then if your blood pressure readings exceed 200/130 then you can understand why there is this panic when the doctors encounter a patient with a reading this high.

In my case the reading was in the region of 216/160 so you can understand that at this point there were alarm bells ringing all over the place when the doctors got round to dealing with me.

As I mentioned earlier, forty odd years ago if you were diagnosed with a level of hypertension this high then there was very little the doctors could do about it but thankfully in today’s medical climate and with today’s research there is an awful lot they can do when they encounter a level of blood pressure this high.

Now medication will only take you so far and there comes a point when will power and the desire to live takes over and you force yourself into some fairly major lifestyle changes. As my cardiologist said to me five years ago you have a simple choice to make in that you had better start making some lifestyle changes soon or you will have to accept the fact that you will be taking some fairly strong medication for the rest of your life.

Now given the fact that I’m a firm believer in that if you spend a fair amount of time ingesting foreign chemicals into your body then you are going to have to accept the fact that sooner or later there are going to be some fairly serious reactions to this and some fairly hefty side effects, then you can understand why I am now a firm believer in lifestyle changes.

Nothing was changed overnight and in fact some lifestyle changes took longer to implement than was ideal but at least five years later I can safely say that at no other time during my six monthly checkups over the last 18 months has my blood pressure reading ever been greater than 120/80.

So go on make that lifestyle change it doesn’t have to be major, start small and build up but at least start somewhere.

About the author: Stephen Morgan writes about a great many health issues on the Internet and more can be found on High Blood Pressure Symptom in Man and at the following: http://www.livingwithhighbloodpressure.net
Source: http://www.articlesbase.com