Certain nutrients are known for increasing or decreasing blood pressure. High blood pressure increases your risk for heart disease, one of the leading causes of death for Americans. However, eating a healthy diet can help you lower your blood pressure. Once you know which nutrients to watch, you will be able to better plan your diet to minimize your risk for high blood pressure.
Features
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, or DASH, diet limits nutrients that can lead to high blood pressure, and focuses on nutrients that can lower your blood pressure. Nutrients to limit include total fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol and sodium. Nutrients to focus on include calcium, fiber, magnesium and potassium. Limit alcohol and caffeine.
Foods to Eat
Concentrate on eating lean protein sources, including fish, poultry, legumes and nuts, low-fat dairy, whole grains and fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables. Choose prepared foods that are low in both sodium and fat, and make most of your fat unsaturated.
Foods to Avoid
Avoid fried foods, deli meats, salty snacks, canned soups, fatty meats, regular salad dressing, pickled foods, condiments and whole milk dairy products, which are all high either in saturated fats or sodium. Baked goods, crackers and fried foods often contain trans fat, so check the labels before you buy them and avoid those with trans fats.
Considerations
Besides individual nutrients, you need to watch your overall calorie intake. Being overweight increases your risk for high blood pressure, so you want to maintain a healthy weight. Exercise can help you to lose weight if you need to, and may lower your blood pressure even without weight loss, according to FamilyDoctor.org.
Expert Insight
The Cleveland Clinic recommends using herbs and spices instead of salt to add flavor to foods, limiting consumption of foods high in fat, calories and salt and using less butter, oil, margarine, salad dressing and shortening, eating foods high in fiber and avoiding alcohol. Concentrate on eating a variety of healthy foods.
