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How to Prevent High Blood Pressure

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Preventing high blood pressure is highly important as this condition can increase your chances of developing heart disease. Your blood pressure is affected by your health, family history and diet. In order to prevent high blood pressure you should attempt to follow a healthy lifestyle and regularly exercise. It is also important to watch what you eat.

There have been several diets that are developed to help you prevent high blood pressure by eating foods that keep your blood pressure low, called the Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH). This DASH diet focuses on low fat dairy, vegetables, low cholesterol foods, low fat foods and fruits. The recommended foods include whole grains, nuts, poultry and fish.

There is another diet called the DASH-sodium diet, as your sodium intake influences your blood pressure. This diet limits your sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams a day. Many studies have shown that decreasing your sodium intake can help control high blood pressure.

Many other factors such as being overweight can also produce high blood pressure. You can prevent high blood pressure by losing a small amount of weight, such as ten pounds. Besides lowering high blood pressure, losing weight also decreases the chance of developing heart disease, high cholesterol and diabetes. Losing weight has a great range of health benefits.

It is also very important that you get regular exercise as exercise affects the heart in particular. The more you exercise the lower your resting heart rate, so exercise is an effective form of treatment for high blood pressure. Your workout does not have to be full out from the start but you can work up to an adequate amount of exercise. It is recommended that you start out with a walking schedule first. You just need to get a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise at least 5 times a week.

Blood pressure is also related to alcohol intake, and over consumption can cause high blood pressure. You should only drink moderately, which means two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women. One ounce of strong liquor, 5 ounces of wine and 12 ounces of beer is considered one drink. If you are trying to lose weight then alcohol can make this difficult.

Smoking also causes high blood pressure and if you are smoker then you should quit in order to prevent high blood pressure. You can bring your blood pressure back to normal in a year just by quitting smoking.