Why Some High Blood Pressure Diets Don’t Work

There are high blood pressure diets that work and some that work better.

Understanding what’s happening with high blood pressure and how foods and nutrients interact gives you the best chance to make your diet work for you.

The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet

The DASH Diet is a standard medical diet given to those with high blood pressure. It’s expected that you will make it a diet you’ll eat for the rest of your life. This diet is based on the idea that a high sodium diet causes hypertension in a significant portion of the population.

When people eat a lot of salty foods, their blood pressure rises. Normally the blood pressure will recover back to normal on its own because of homeostatic mechanisms but if people continue to eat a high sodium diet, then their body loses that elasticity of the blood vessels to contract and dilate. By removing excess salt from the diet, the ability returns to the blood vessels to expand and dilate.

On the DASH Diet, the sodium is restricted to 2300 mg per day but one thing people don’t realize is that the potassium level is increased also. It’s the proper ratio of sodium to potassium in the diet that makes a big difference in those with high blood pressure.

The DASH Diet limits high sodium foods such as the ones found in this list:

* processed meats
* anchovies (packed with high levels of salt)
* chips and nuts that are salted
* many processed foods including desserts (usually high in sodium)
* high sodium cheeses
* salty seasonings and spice mixtures
* canned foods

A daily meal plan on the DASH Diet includes:

* 2-3 servings of milk and dairy products (low sodium cheeses)
* 6 oz poultry, fish or meat
* 1 serving of nuts and seeds (unsalted)
* 6 to 8 servings of grain
* 4 to 5 servings vegetables (not canned)
* 2 to 3 servings of oil or fat
* Sweets only sporadically

Questions about High Blood Pressure Diets

Interestingly, there’s another perspective on this DASH Diet that should be considered. If you’re going to give up all your high-sodium foods, you should have a pretty big carrot at the end of the string, right? Well, with the DASH Diet, the results are only a drop in systolic pressure of 7 to 12 points. When people have high blood pressure readings of 220/112, frankly, the DASH Diet is not good enough. This tells us that there must be a serious mistake made in this diet because it is not effective enough.

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