Diet and disease - hypertension
Being diagnosed with a condition such as high blood pressure is a shock for most people; the condition itself can hinder you in your daily life but it can also lead to other complications such as stroke, heart disease, kidney failure and even early dementia.
Once the bad news has sunk in, it is vital that you take stock of the situation and rejoice in the fact that there is a lot you can do to help manage hypertension and the health it poses.
Modifying your diet is one of the things you have within your control and can be easier than you think. Learning what you need to eat more of, and what you need to avoid, is the first step on your journey to a healthier you.
Salt and hypertension
A high salt diet causes fluid retention which leads to increased pressure inside the blood vessels – a condition known as hypertension.
Other factors such as obesity and lack of exercise can also contribute to hypertension, but recent research suggests that salt intake is the major culprit, especially in type of hypertension you get as you get older.
The maximum recommended salt intake for an adult is 6g per day – this may seem like a lot but check out a few of todays’ food labels and you will see that the salt content soon adds up.
· Two slices of medium white bread contains 0.72g of salt
· Two teaspoons of margarine contains 0.11g of salt
If you have toast for breakfast and a sandwich at lunchtime, that’s more than a quarter of the maximum recommended salt intake before you’ve even filled the sandwich or put something tasty on your toast, so it’s not surprising that the typical salt intake in UK adults today is 8g per day with some people consuming even more.
What can you do today to reduce your salt intake?
Cut down on processed foods (one of the biggest contributors to dietary salt in a modern diet) and consume low salt options where available.
Replacing sodium salts with potassium salts can also help to lower your blood pressure as well as having health benefits in its own right.
A systematic review of peer-reviewed literature (see below) showed that reduction of dietary salt by about 4.4 g per day was associated with a reduction in systolic/diastolic blood pressure of 4.2/2.1 and the effect was even more pronounced in patients who had hypertension (5.4/2.8).
He FJ, Li J, Macgregor GA. Effect of longer-term modest salt reduction on blood pressure. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013;(4):Cd004937.