Any High Blood Pressure Diet

Or any diet can lower blood pressure provided you lose weight. But is there a high blood pressure diet proven to lower blood pressure even if you don’t lose weight?

Weight Loss Lowers Blood Pressure:

If you have read this page Lower Blood Pressure you know that each kilogram (2.2 lbs) of weight loss causes an average of 1 mm of Hg drop in blood pressure. If you already have hypertension it lowers it even more. So any diet that does not hurt your health and enables you to lose weight will quite probably lower your blood pressure. But then it’s not the diet but the weight loss that causes the drop. How about a proven diet that causes blood pressure to drop with or without weight loss?

The DASH Diet:

There is a diet just like that and it is called the DASH diet. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. The Joint National Committee on Prevention, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (the JNC) recommends this diet as a primary measure in the treatment and prevention of high blood pressure. This diet emphasizes fruits, vegetables, nuts and low fat dairy products along with reduced saturated and total fat and reduced refined carbohydrates (sugar). The usual American diet was used as the control in this landmark study by the DASH Collaborative Research Group and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, the top American medical journal.

Results:

After eight weeks the DASH high blood pressure diet lowered systolic pressure by 5.5 mm compared with the controls. African Americans derived more benefit with a 6.9 mm reduction. People with hypertension derived even greater benefit with 11.6 mm reduction. Note that people without hypertension derived benefit. The researchers noticed the benefit occurring rapidly, at the 2-week mark. Best of all, they saw this without weight loss or regard to calorie restriction.

Doctor’s Practical Guide:

Does it not seem logical that mankind evolved eating what they could gather and our systems are not set up to tolerate fat, red meat, sugar and salt and other processing?

Anyway, I learned from experience that very few people are capable of dieting or doing it for very long. More people can do it a little at a time. Just start working on it, gradually shifting towards more fruits and vegetables and less fat, salt, and sugar. Just think that you have a lifetime to work on it and whatever progress you make you are that much to the good. Something really is better than nothing.

The entire DASH diet can be found on the internet. Do a Google search on "DASH diet" and look at various results until you find what you like. Bookmark it or put it in Favorites or download it and refer to it as needed. It is free, of course.

As a reminder, the best way to monitor the results of your high blood pressure diet is to take your blood pressure yourself. It’s easy and even fun. See the page on How To Take Blood Pressure