Posted by Mike
(here)
My bp has been high for some time now...So im looking for any sort of way to get it down a little
Apologies 
FFT from “The Starch Solution: Eat the Foods You Love, Regain Your Health, and Lose the Weight for Good!” by: Dr. John McDougall; Mary McDougall.
“This profound change in blood pressure is due to the overall impact of a healthy diet that is low in fat, animal protein, and calories, and high in potassium, dietary fiber, and carbohydrates. These healthy dietary components improve the health of the blood vessels and overall circulation, significantly lowering elevated blood pressure as a result.”
“Why would cutting back on salt harm your cardiovascular system and increase your risk of dying?
We are physiologically designed to seek out and eat salt. When we do not eat enough of it, the body changes in ways that include increasing its production of adrenal hormones, reducing salt losses from the kidneys and skin, and many other adjustments that help us to retain salt. Furthermore, salt restriction raises cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Over the long term, stresses caused by these physiological adaptations for survival may injure our blood vessels and lead to more heart attacks and strokes.”
The reason you may believe these two added ingredients represent the core of culinary evil has more to do with marketing than with science. Scapegoating salt and sugar deflects attention from the real problems: meat, dairy, fats, oils, and processed foods.
FOR THE LOVE OF SALT, SHOULD I DIE?
Sodium restriction is the most widely publicized, non-medicinal recommendation for preventing heart disease and stroke. This advice is based mostly on older research and largely reflects studies involving extreme changes in sodium intake, such as reducing sodium to less than 500 milligrams per day in order to lower blood pressure.
Has this recommendation made any difference in the average person’s health? Not according to recent research and careful analysis of the data. Why? First, almost no one has been able to follow this advice because a low-salt diet simply is not palatable. People would rather risk illness and death than make this kind of sacrifice. If handfuls of costly blood pressure— lowering pills will allow them to get their salt back and avoid a bland-tasting diet, swallow them they will. The second reason is that reducing salt consumption is of little medical benefit and may even be hazardous to your health.
The major medical concern about salt is that it raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure— more than 140/ 90 millimeters of mercury (mmHg)— is a risk factor for heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease. Randomized clinical trials, however, show that reducing high sodium intake by an average of 1,725 milligrams (a teaspoon and a half of salt) to 2,300 milligrams per day, the current USDA recommendation, lowers the systolic blood pressure (the top number in your blood pressure reading) by 1 to 5 points and the diastolic (bottom number) by 0.6 to 3 points. 3,4 On the McDougall Diet, with no limitation of the amount of salt added to foods at the table, the average reduction for people starting out with this level of blood pressure (140/ 90 mmHg or greater) is 15 points systolic and 13 points diastolic in just 7 days.
This is especially remarkable considering that in almost all cases, blood pressure medications are stopped on the first day of my 10-day live-in program. This profound change in blood pressure is due to the overall impact of a healthy diet that is low in fat, animal protein, and calories, and high in potassium, dietary fiber, and carbohydrates. These healthy dietary components improve the health of the blood vessels and overall circulation, significantly lowering elevated blood pressure as a result.
What I observe in my patients can also be seen in society as a whole. Hypertension is rare in indigenous communities with diets that are based on starches, even when the diet is quite high in sodium. 6 When these healthy indigenous people move to urban settings and adopt a Western diet rich in animal products and processed foods, they develop hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. The importance of the overall diet, rather than any single component (sodium), is the fundamental reason that vegetarians tend to have low blood pressure regardless of how much salt they consume.
REDUCING SALT MAY INCREASE YOUR RISK OF DEATH AND DISEASE
In 2007, the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), studying nearly 100 million US adults, reported “a robust, significant, and consistent inverse association between dietary sodium and cardiovascular mortality.” In other words, people who ate more salt had less risk of dying from heart disease and strokes.
In a population study published in 2011 in the Journal of the American Medical Association involving 3,681 participants without cardiovascular disease, investigators found that the less sodium a person consumed, the higher his or her risk of death from strokes and heart attacks. The authors’ conclusion: “The associations between systolic pressure and sodium excretion did not translate into less morbidity or improved survival. On the contrary, low sodium excretion predicted higher cardiovascular mortality. Taken together, our current findings… do not support the current recommendations of a generalized and indiscriminate reduction of salt intake at the population level.”
The Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the US Department of Health and Human Services, reported in 2011 in the American Journal of Hypertension its review of seven major studies. It concluded that there was no strong evidence of benefit from salt restriction, and that this restriction increased the risk of death in people with congestive heart failure.
Why would cutting back on salt harm your cardiovascular system and increase your risk of dying? We are physiologically designed to seek out and eat salt. When we do not eat enough of it, the body changes in ways that include increasing its production of adrenal hormones, reducing salt losses from the kidneys and skin, and many other adjustments that help us to retain salt. Furthermore, salt restriction raises cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Over the long term, stresses caused by these physiological adaptations for survival may injure our blood vessels and lead to more heart attacks and strokes.
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