High Blood Pressure
 

Cutting Your Salt Intake Is Not The Only Way To Reduce Blood Pressure

There have long been a series of what can best be described as old wives titles typically surrounding what you can do and what you don't have to do in relation to high blood pressure.

Now usually leading the charge in this category of what can be also described as “bar room advice” is that all you need to do to treat high blood pressure is to reduce your intake of salt. Now while this piece of advice is basically sound though and is certainly one of the things you should consider, it is certainly not the beginning and the end of how you treat high blood pressure.

Whilst the intake of salt and the effect that sodium has is certainly a crucial factor in relation to high blood pressure. High blood pressure treatment is about a lot more than just cutting back on salt.

 

The reason this issue has recently come to the fore is that organizations right across the globe recently have been issuing policy statements calling for people to cut their stadium intake in half by the year 2020.

A lot of organizations have been suggesting that we need to take our present average intake of sodium which he is approximately calculated to be 3,500 milligrams per day down to between 1,200 and 2,300 milligrams per day.

Now 3500 mg a day of sodium is a lot and to cut it in half is certainly an ambitious undertaking but is one that is a good target to aim at as long as we are careful.

The danger with this message is that people become too tightly focused on dealing with Sodium in their diet and tend to take their eye off the ball with regards to other factors in their lifestyle and diet that might actually be contributing more damage to their high blood pressure.

The other aspect in all of this is that in an attempt to cut back on the amount of salt in their diet people practically change the diet that they are used to and because of the lack of foresight and careful planning tend to find other nutrients that have a more benevolent aspect get reduced as well.

We tend to forget that in a lot of cases where sodium is present as a constituent part of any food quite often magnesium, calcium, potassium and other useful nutrients exists also. Now the danger here is that we reduce the food that contains the sodium but also reduce the other elements as well.

Now it is fine to reduce the sodium but actually magnesium, calcium and potassium all appear to have what could best be described as blood pressure lowering effects.

So what we are saying here is that it is not impossible to reduce the salt in our diets and indeed that's a very good thing but what you have to do is think carefully about those foods that you plan to cut back on and make sure that you don’t actually cut back on the “good stuff” as well!

Careful planning is all that it takes, nothing more and nothing less. It is not a complex science and is one that certainly we should not get “beaten out of shape” over, just be sensible.

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