Eat Like A Hog To Lower Blood Pressure

Are you one of the 60 million Americans with high blood pressure?  Would you like to quit that less than elite club?  What if I told you, you can eat your way to lower blood pressure?  What if I told you, you could literally eat like a hog and drop 9 to 10 points off your blood pressure reading?

Would you be willing to give that a try?

Your current diet is probably why you have high blood pressure in the first place.  Our Western diet is chock full of salt, cholesterol and saturated fats.  We eat very little fresh food meaning almost everything we eat has been processed one way or another.

Think about this for a minute. Even though there have been tremendous breakthroughs in farming and food technology (much of what we eat today didn’t exist in its current form 50 years ago) our bodies have not evolved to keep up with the changes.  It’s like our bodies want leaded gas but all we have available to feed it is unleaded.  Just like a car’s engine, our body will still run but it will run rough until it quits altogether.

Eating food that we were not designed to eat has created imbalances in our bodies.  One of the results of those imbalances is high blood pressure.  Because of our huge increase in consuming sodium, we have set up an environment that ultimately encourages oxidation and it is that oxidation that creates plaque, blockages and is partly responsible for the hardening of the blood vessels.

When the blood vessels lose their elasticity and their diameter is reduced by plaque and blockages, more pressure is created against the blood vessel walls each time the heart pumps.  I’m sure you already know this but that increased pressure can lead to some pretty serious conditions like stroke, blindness, kidney failure and heart attack.

So if we caused this condition by eating food that was bad for us what can we do?  Why not try eating food that is good for us?

The American Heart Association endorses a diet called DASH and claims that blood pressure can be reduced by as much 10 mm HMC in just a few weeks.

DASH is based on reducing salt intake and greatly increasing the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables.  Fresh foods, or foods that are freshly frozen, contain the vitamins, minerals, good fats and antioxidants that our body was designed to eat.  Don’t mistake this for a vegetarian diet because it’s not.  However several servings of red meat are replaced with fish, poultry and lean white meat.

DASH is also not a weight loss diet but you will undoubtedly lose weight on it.  DASH is not so concerned about how much you eat but rather what you eat.  Remember I said you could eat like a hog?  Do you know what hogs eat?  They eat corn, barley, oats, wheat and rye, all whole grains.  The farmer will add in cottonseed, nuts and soy beans as well.  You can eat as much of that stuff as you can stomach.

The diet has some surprising “super foods” that are particularly helpful in repairing the damage done by high blood pressure.  Garlic, bananas, tomatoes, all kinds of berries, spinach, cauliflower and pistachios all have surprisingly high nutrient content.

So the choice is yours.  You can continue to pop blood pressure medication every day for the rest of your life, or you can take responsibility for your body and explore the natural way to lower blood pressure.  Your body will thank you for caring.

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