What Causes Hypertension and How to Treat It.

High Blood pressure:

High blood pressure is a big deal... because its puts stress on your heart and your arteries, raising your chances of a heart attack or stroke. Over time, high blood pressure can damage and narrow your arteries reducing blood flow around your body. And since all the tissues and organs in your body need blood to work, that means things like your brain, your kidneys, your eyesight and your sex life can be affected, reducing the quality of your life and shortening it significantly.

  Salt... as used in cooking, in preserving and processing foods, and as a flavour enhancer... is sodium chloride, which consists of sodium 40% and chlorine 60% by mass. Salt dissolves in water and breaks up into its sodium and chlorine ions. Your body cannot make sodium chloride and depends on your diet for a healthy supply of this nutrient.

As virtually every diabetic knows, a type 2 diabetic has a better than 80% chance of also being hypertensive, ie suffering from high blood pressure. And we all know that, besides taking a daily medication to control our blood pressure, we should eat a low salt diet because excessive salt intake is the main cause of high blood pressure.

 But is excessive salt intake really the main cause of high blood pressure? Recent studies suggest that this might not be so.

 Is too much salt really the cause of high blood pressure?

 In the 2017 issue of the American Journal of Medicine it was claimed in a paper titled Is Salt a Culprit or an Innocent Bystander in Hypertension? that the notion that excessive salt consumption leads to hypertension is based on opinion, not on fact.

 The paper cited a Cochrane Review of almost 170 studies which noted that sodium restriction only lowers blood pressure by 1% to 3% in people with normal blood pressure (normotensives) and between 3.5% and 7% in people with high blood pressure (hypertensives).

 Cochrane Reviews are systematic reviews of primary research in human health care and health policy, and are internationally recognised as the highest standard in evidence-based health care.

 Sugar, the paper went on to claim, is the more likely primary cause of hypertension.

This study derived some support from a previous study of 133,000 adults, published in The Lancet in 2016, which found that a high sodium intake, compared with a moderate sodium intake, was associated among hypertensives with a greater risk of cardiovascular events and death. But no such association occurred among normotensives.

However, a low sodium intake was associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular events and death in both hypertensives and normotensives. This suggests that that lowering sodium intake is best targeted at populations with hypertension who consume high salt diets.

 The notion that there is no good science to back up the hypothesis that salt is one of the major causes of hypertension is open to challenge. Indeed, sodium is an essential ion for nerve conduction, muscle contraction and cell signalling, so restricting your intake of salt unduly could be harmful.

The best treatment: 

So the dietary advice of a low-salt diet has not changed, but now it comes with additional advice to ensure that you have an adequate intake of potassium also.

 The take-away is that eating plenty of potassium is just as important as limiting salt or sodium intake... and, as luck would have it, there are plenty of ways you can get lots of potassium into your body without resorting to supplements.

Fruits are best... apricots, bananas, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, plums, grapes, figs, olives, blueberries, peaches, gooseberries, tomatoes, apples, prunes, and raisins all contain varying levels of potassium.

Good vegetable sources... include potatoes with the peel on, cauliflower, lettuce, cress, spinach, beetroot, and celery.

Other good sources of potassium are... nuts, almonds, legumes, oats, whole wheat, and fresh meat.

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