Reducing Stress and Maintaining Good Blood Pressure

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, which means cutting back on salt, losing excess weight, and maintaining a diet high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, is the cornerstone for preventing and treating hypertension. If you don’t have diabetes or damage to the heart, brain, kidneys, or eyes, lifestyle changes alone may be enough to bring a high blood pressure reading into the normal range.

A March 1998 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that reduced sodium intake and weight loss constitute a feasible, effective, and safe nonpharmacologic therapy of hypertension in older persons.

Even if your doctor prescribes high blood pressure medication to control your blood pressure, you should still adopt healthy habits. Results of the first Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, offered some of the most encouraging news that diet can help control blood pressure. In fact, the results were so promising that the JNC guidelines recommend all Americans — not just those with hypertension — follow the DASH diet. Low in fat and rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products, this eating plan significantly and quickly lowered blood pressure in people with hypertension enrolled in the multicenter study. Researchers do not attribute the blood pressure reductions of the DASH trial to any single food or nutrient. Compared with the typical American diet, the DASH eating plan had a relatively higher calcium content and less salt, total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. It also had 173% more magnesium, 150% more potassium, 240% more fiber, and 30% more protein.

Foods high in potassium
Bananas, citrus fruit, dried apricots, fish (especially salmon, flounder, and tuna), green leafy vegetables, legumes, melons, potatoes, poultry, tomatoes, whole-grain cereals, yogurt

Foods high in calcium
Blackstrap molasses, broccoli, canned sardines and salmon (with bones), dairy products (milk, cheese, and yogurt), kale, tofu

Foods high in fiber
Apples, barley, brown rice, corn, legumes, nuts, potatoes with skin, prunes, whole-grain cereal and bread, yams

Foods high in magnesium
Fish, green leafy vegetables, legumes, meat, nuts, poultry, whole grains