Learn to fight high blood pressure

The fact that we live in a stressful environment is not a secret to anyone. We have stressful jobs, busy lives, a tone of work to take care of everyday, families, maybe some screaming children as well, and no time for ourselves unfortunately. That, alongside consuming the wrong foods can make you suffer form high blood pressure.

Blood pressure is represented by the power with which the blood is traveling through your veins. When the blood pressure is high (hypertension), it means that the blood is traveling rapidly, hitting the vein walls with an elevated force.

Dr. Andrew Weil says that "hypertension is often called a because even severe, uncontrolled high blood pressure often has no obvious symptoms. However, even when absolute blood pressure levels are only moderately elevated, patients may report headaches, dizzy spells, or nosebleeds. In general, however, these symptoms don't occur unless there has been a rapid, acute change in blood pressure, or until blood pressure has reached dangerous levels".

There are a lot of factors that can trigger high blood pressure into a patient, says Dr. Weil, but its not a certain pattern that can address to everyone with this condition. "The risk of high blood pressure increases with age as arterial walls lose their elasticity. There can be many contributing factors, yet doctors often cannot identify an exact cause for high blood pressure, in which case the person is said to have ", says Dr Andrew in his article.

The factors that could contribute to this condition are: stress, a diet rich in salt and low in magnesium, calcium and potassium, excessive alcohol intake, insulin resistance, medications (like birth control pills, diet pills, steroids, decongestants, and others) and being overweight.

Due to a diet rich in salt (taken from a lot of foods like: processed foods, fast foods, pastry, cold cuts and many others to which most people add extra salt when cooking with them), lack of exercise and bad diet, led to the manifestation of this condition in children as well. "Even young children can develop high blood pressure, but these cases often go undiagnosed. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007 concluded that approximately two million children in the U.S. have high blood pressure, yet only 500,000 cases will be diagnosed. The principle cause is the ongoing epidemic of childhood obesity. It's estimated that about 30 percent of overweight and obese children have high blood pressure and that the problem is likely to worsen as the epidemic continues", said dr. Weil.

The indication that Andrew Weil, M.D. gives to people is to limit the caffeine and alcohol intake, stop smoking, avoid processed foods, exercise, maintain optimal weight, pay extra attention to the medicine intake and try out the DASH diet, which he says that "it emphasizes generous amounts of fruits and vegetables and low-fat or fat-free dairy products that provide adequate calcium. The diet is also relatively low in fat and sodium. DASH researchers have shown that diets rich in potassium, calcium and magnesium, and low in sodium (2,400 mg or less), play an important role in blood pressure control".