What you eat and drink affects your blood pressure

To keep your blood pressure healthy and low, you will want to eat and drink less of some things and more of others.

What To Eat:

Celery
If you went to an Asian herbalist asking for advice about high BP, chances are he or she’d tell you to take four stalks of celery daily and call in a week.  Some researchers say the crunchy vegetable contains a chemical that can lower levels of stress hormones in your blood.  This allows your blood vessels to expand, giving your blood more room to flow and reducing pressure.

Folic Acid
Previously recommended for women as a prevention to birth defects, researchers have now discovered that folic acid also plays an important role in reducing the risk of high blood pressure in some women.   Folic acid can be found in citrus fruits, tomatoes, leafy green vegetables, including spinach and romaine lettuce, beans, including pinto, navy, lentil and kidney

Researchers conducted a study that involved more than 150,000 women divided into two age groups.

The purpose of the study was to find out if there was a connection between high blood pressure risk and folate intake.

Caution: According to Dr. Mercola, there is no denying folic acid is good for you, however, the value you get from consuming folic acid is determined in where you get it from. For example, this nutrient is best obtained through organic, fresh uncooked whole vegetables.

Garlic
Bad breath (unless you buy a de-scented pill) is the price to pay for warding off high blood pressure in the lungs with garlic. According to research on rats, an ingredient in garlic was found to prevent pulmonary hypertension, a potentially deadly type of high blood pressure in the arteries that bring blood to the lungs.

Researchers explain that the ingredient allicin likely prevents pulmonary hypertension by causing the constricted blood vessels to relax, and by preventing damage to the blood vessels.

For humans, pulmonary hypertension can lead to potentially fatal complications in the heart and blood vessels. And while consuming two cloves of garlic every day would equal that of the rats’ dosage in the experiment, additional research needs to be done before doctors are able to recommend garlic to patients who have an increased risk of pulmonary hypertension.  In the meantime, garlic is a healthy and flavorful (tho smelly) herb to eat.

High Fiber Foods
Get 20 percent or more of your daily calories from high-fiber foods such as whole grains, legumes, fruit and vegetables.  This simple change in your diet could drop your systolic BP 4 to 8 points and your diastolic BP another 6 to 8 points.  Start with these fiber-rich recipes below.

How Fiber Helps
Both soluble (able to dissolve in water) and insoluble (not able to dissolve in water) fiber were shown to lower blood pressure in middle-aged people with the unfortunate combo of borderline high cholesterol and pre-hypertension. Soluble fiber does double duty by lowering cholesterol, too.

Help yourself to both kinds of fiber with these tasty recipes from Eating Well.com.

High fiber recipes from Eating Well

• Southwestern Corn and Black Bean Salad (13 grams of fiber per serving)
• Butternut and Barley Pilaf (8 grams of fiber per serving)
• White Beans, Spinach, and Tomatoes Over Parmesan Toasts (15 grams of fiber per serving)
• Trio of Peas (5 grams of fiber per serving)

Grape Seed Extract
Another powerful antioxidant that has been shown to reduce blood pressure by an average of 8-12 millimeters. The antioxidant capacity of grape seed extract comes from proanthocyanidins. Scientific studies have shown that the antioxidant power of proanthocyanidins is 20 times stronger than vitamin C and 50 times stronger than vitamin E.

Olive Leaf Extract
One recent study found that supplement users taking 1,000 mg of olive leaf extract per day showed a substantial dip in their blood pressure, in addition to lowered levels of LDL cholesterol. The active agent responsible for the hypotensive action of the olive leaf is oleuropein, which acts as an antioxidant and helps relax and dilate your blood vessels.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids
As stated elsewhere fish oil, krill oil, and flax seed oil are good for you and can help to lower your blood pressure.

V8 For Hypertension?
According to Dr. Julian Whitaker in his Health and Healing newsletter, if he had to select just one thing for high blood pressure it would be Low Sodium V8 juice.

He states, “Low Sodium V8 has a slight blood-thinning effect, which reduces pressure on the arteries, and it’s loaded with potassium, which balances sodium and helps lower blood pressure”.  His suggestion is to drink 12 ounces of this juice every day.

If you have high blood pressure it’s certainly safe to drink V8.  Just be sure that it’s low on salt (sodium).

Vitamins C & E
Vitamins C and E are antioxidants, compounds that neutralize cell-damaging free radicals. Recent studies have shown that antioxidants may help to reduce high blood pressure (hypertension), possibly by protecting the body’s supply of nitric oxide, a molecule that relaxes blood vessels.  This is another reason for eating fruits and vegetables that are big on “C”.

Vitamin D
The author was reading a book on sunlight and health and learned that exposure to sunlight actually significantly lowered blood pressure.  Medline published an article in 1997from a peer-reviewed journal that supports this concept. In fact, it appears that the further from the equator one moves the more risk there is of high blood pressure.  Of course, the further you move from the equator, sunlight becomes less intense.

What To Avoid:

Avoid alcohol or drink in moderation.
Too many drinks per day can raise your B/P.

Avoid high-fat meat, dairy products, fried and fast foods.
Their saturated fats clog up blood vessels and make them less elastic.  If you had a blood test after a high-fat meal, you would see that your blood is white rather than red.  That’s the undigested fat floating around in there.

Avoid partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
Since saturated fats help to lengthen the shelf life of baked foods, and we know we should avoid saturated fats, the food industry came up with this approach to make you buy their products.  However, chemically changing the oils into trans-fats makes them harmful.

Avoid sweets.
A Swiss study found that when people consumed 60 grams of fructose, their systolic blood pressure spiked by as much as 6 points for 2 hours afterward.  “Your blood vessels don’t relax after you consume fructose” said the lead researcher “and your heart is forced to beat faster and more powerfully.”

Drink coffee and sodas in moderation.
Caffeine stimulates your heart to beat more rapidly.

Kick the salt habit.
Salt absorbs water, which means the more salt you eat, the greater the volume of water in your blood.  More volume can mean higher blood pressure.  If you want flavoring, use herbs, spices, salsa or lemon juice instead.

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