Hypertension – Dietary Factors
Following on from my introduction to hypertension and lifestyle factors, I want to explore the link between diet and hypertension in this blog.
Optimise your Gut Flora
Compared to a placebo, people with high blood pressure who consumed probiotics lowered systolic blood pressure (the top number) by 3.56 mm Hg and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 2.38 mm Hg1. Including taking probiotics, its is helpful to avoid sugar and processed foods. I should mention that naturally fermented foods in your diet, may contain about 100 times the amount of bacteria than found in a bottle of high potency probiotics. But I appreciate form a practical point of view, buying probiotics is much easier!
Eat a Healthy Diet
I appreciate this is very common advice. In 1998 in the journal of Diabetes reported that nearly two-thirds of the test subjects who were insulin resistant also high high blood pressure. Insulin resistance is directly attributed to a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet especially if combined with inadequate exercise.
Avoiding processed foods (due to their being high in sugar/fructose, grains, trans fat, and other damaged fats) is my number one recommendation if you have high blood pressure2. Instead, make whole, ideally organic, foods the focus of your diet. As you reduce processed foods, and other sources of non-vegetable carbs, from your diet, you’ll want to replace them with healthy fat.
References
Related Posts
Does Reflexology help foot pain/tension or plantar fasciitis?
One of the most frequent questions I am asked by clients, is "will reflexology help my foot pain/tension or plantart fasciitis"? Reflexology is a whole body treatment, where the therapists stimulates reflex points on the feet to effect healing in the corresponding parts of the body. Reflexology allows the body to rebalance, which assists you to:
- De-stress
- Improve your sleeping patterns
- Reduce anxiety
- Calm an over active mind
- Relax the body to aid digestion
Elbow Pain
Recently we have treated a few cases of elbow pain.
There are two common site for elbow pain, the outside edge of the elbow which is often an indication of tennis elbow or lateral epicondylitis and the inside edge of the elbow which is often an indication of glofer's elbow or medial epicondylitis. With both of these conditions the pain may radiate up the arm and / or down along the forearm.
Both conditions can be caused by precise wrist movements from using a mouse or keyboard. As the name suggests tennis elbow can be caused by faulty backhand technique when playing tennis. While golfer's elbow can be caused by poor technique when playing Golf or faulty forehand technique when playing tennis.
In addition tennis elbow can be caused by carrying heavy shopping bags as it causes tension in the wrist extensors.
Most of the cases we see are caused by long hours using computers. The first thing we do is try and establish the cause of the pain, which can be tightness or spasm in the muscles of the forearm, neck or shoulders and then treat accordingly. We can also show you simple stretches to stretch out the muscles of the forearm.
What surprised us, and prompted me to write this blog is that they all the clients had just assumed that elbow pain was something that they just had to lived with. In all the cases we dramatically reduced the pain and in most cases after a few treatments the clients were pain free! So don't sit their in pain, book a massage.
