Unhealthy Food Raises Blood Pressure

Unhealthy Food Raises Blood Pressure

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If you're looking for unhealthy food, look no farther than processed food. For the most part processed food is bad food.

How do I know that? Well, I eat the stuff, as you might, and I don't like what it does to my body.

But, ever so often I get religion and swear off nasty unhealthy food. Yet, some of it tastes so delicious I have a hard time.

The good news is that my resolve is getting better, which is why I have hopes for you. If I can do it, so can you.

If you got to this page looking for a list of lousy food choices, you might as well skip on to something else. If you are here for some education, stick around.

Your blood pressure is one of the best indicators of your health. So, we're going to be talking about achieving normal blood pressure or maintaining current normal blood pressure as you get older?

To do this and save you some time, let's focus on bad food that's known to increase blood pressure, i.e., processed grains - grains with the fiber and nourishing germ refined out, leaving starch and, especially, gluten.

These leftovers end up in thousands of packaged products such as flour, soups, dressings, sauces, dips, desserts, boxed mixes, convenience snacks and bakery products.

Some controversy exists whether the blood pressure effect is due to gluten or the removal of fiber and germ, especially as certain fibers are known to reduce blood pressure. I'll show you some research to illustrate:

Dr. Davis, MD, reports that it's not uncommon in his clinic to get systolic blood pressure reductions of 20 to 40 mmHg by eliminating wheat and corn starch from the diets of his patients. Basically, he was talking gluten free diet.

A study appearing in the Journal of Human Hypertension detailed the experience of a lady who adhered to a gluten free diet that included additional B6, B12, folic acid and iron supplementation. Her blood pressure decreased from and average of 155/95 to an average of 128/80 in 15 months.

These results seem to indicate that gluten was the culprit. Let's look at other studies that may point in another direction.

In a 16 week controlled trial reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, healthy middle-aged adults had improvements in blood pressure by replacing in their diets refined grains with whole grains.

The trial had 233 participants. After 4 weeks eating refined grains, they were divided into 3 groups: Group 1 continued the refined grain diet. Group 2 replaced 3 servings of refined grains with 3 servings of whole wheat. Group 3 exchanged 3 servings of refined grains with 3 servings of whole wheat and oats.

After 12 weeks groups 2 and 3 had a systolic blood pressure decrease of 5 or 6 mmHg compared to group 1. The diastolic pressure didn't change.

I've run an experiment on myself for one month where I eliminated gluten completely. There was no significant change in my systolic or diastolic blood pressure. However, I did not cut out processed foods.

So, it's not clear if gluten is unhealthy for people with hypertension. If you are working to reduce your blood pressure naturally, try a gfd for 2 months and see what happens with your blood pressure. Another good experiment would be to eliminate all processed food for a month or two.

Start your war on unhealthy food and support that with other methods mentioned on this site.

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Information on this website is for nutritional use only. For medical advice about blood pressure, hypertensive heart disease, or heart attack symptoms, see your health care practitioner.

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