How Diet Affects Blood Pressure
Its important to understand that uncontrolled high blood pressure is a very serious health concern that can lead to heart disease and increases your risk of having a stroke.
The good news though is that following a healthy nutrition plan, along with exercising and implementing effective stress reduction techniques will normalize blood pressure in most people.
So please review the guidelines below, and look through the related article links at the end to learn more if you or someone you know is affected by high blood pressure. Its actually an easily treated condition, but one that can cause serious damage to your health if its ignored.
Your Diet Will Raise or Lower Your Blood Pressure
Are you on a high grain, low fat regimen? If so, I have bad news for you, because this nutritional combination is a prescription for hypertension and can absolutely devastate your health.
Groundbreaking research published in 1998 in the journal Diabetes reported that nearly two-thirds of the test subjects who were insulin resistant (IR) also had high blood! pressur e, and insulin resistance is directly attributable to a high sugar, high grain diet along with insufficient amounts of exercise.
So, chances are that if you have hypertension, you also have poorly controlled blood sugar levels because these two problems often go hand in hand. As your insulin level elevates, so does your blood pressure.
As explained by Dr. Rosedale, insulin stores magnesium, but if your insulin receptors are blunted and your cells grow resistant to insulin, you cant store magnesium so it passes out of your body through urination. Magnesium stored in your cells relaxes muscles.
If your magnesium level is too low, your blood vessels will constrict rather than relax, which will raise your blood pressure and decrease your energy level.
Insulin also affects your blood pressure by causing your body to retain sodium. Sodium retention causes fluid retention. Fluid retention in turn causes high blood pressure, and can ultimately lead to congestive heart failure.
If your hypertension is the direct result of an out-of-control blood sugar level, then normalizing your blood sugar levels will also bring your blood pressure readings into the healthy range.
