Recently I have been approached by a wide variety of friends that have been grappling with unhealthy blood pressure levels for a myriad of reasons. Whether it is my friend who recently gave birth a month early due to preeclampsia or another who simply has a genetic predisposition to hypertension, the treatment is virtually the same , but first I want to explain a bit about high blood pressure.
As complicated as this chronic disease may seem it is really very simply, sodium and potassium work together to create the proper tensile strength in our arteries for ideal blood flow. Skew towards more sodium in your diet and they tighten and tense up resulting in too high blood pressure, much less likely but with profound health problems as well too much potassium in the diet and pressure gets to low. So here we see another need to find proper balance in our lives, this time in the amount of sodium and potassium in our diet. But how do we achieve this?
It is actually fairly simple. We often don’t recognize the sodium levels in packaged and processed foods because it is sweet foods such as cereals and packaged baked goods that have absurdly high sodium levels, foods that don’t taste remotely salty. In fact most cereals have sodium levels greater than pretzels and chips where we taste the salt! But The Optimal Kitchen is always more about what we should eat and not simply what to avoid so let’s focus on increasing those potassium levels, how do we do this?
It is actually quite simply FRESH FRUITS AND VEGETABLES, lots of them!!!! If you follow the Optimal Kitchen at all you have heard this many times and pretty much is the go to solution for holistically controlling any cardiovascular or metabolic issue. All fruits and vegetables are naturally high in potassium, not just bananas which are pretty high in sugar. Another reason to get those 9, YES 9, daily servings of fruits and vegetables everyday. Keep your fruit whole and raw and be sure to eat the rainbow since every color of vegetable has a different purpose in promoting Optimal health. So before you decide to go on any hypertensive medication, try shifting to an all vegetable, whole food diet for a week and see the amazing results
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