Two critical lifestyle changes that doctors know lower your high blood pressure are cutting your salt intake and getting regular exercise, but a new study finds that the health benefits of exercise may actually influence the effects of salt on the body. Being active seems to help keep your blood pressure from going up even after eating an incredibly large amount of salt, as much as 18,000 milligrams a day.
For healthy adults, the recommended sodium daily intake is 2,300 milligrams, 1,500 per day if you’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure.
High blood pressure is serious, even though it has no symptoms it does lasting damage to the heart, kidneys and other body parts.
Knowing your numbers is the first step, even if you feel just fine, to seeing where you stand and if you need to be doing something special to stay healthy.
If you’re being treated for hypertension and your numbers are good, that’s a sign that while you still have the disease, things are under control. You need to do everything you can to keep them that way.
Thing is, if you’re like most people, you’re taking in far more salt than recommended. And since some of us are more sensitive to the affects of salt than others are, by retaining more salt, causing fluid retention that impacts blood pressure.
This study is the first to look at the relationship between salt intake and regular exercise, and adds good information to what we know about how to keep your blood pressure in check. How salt influences blood pressure isn’t fully understood just yet, but what experts do know is that over the long term the more salt you eat, the higher chance you’ll have high blood pressure as you get to midlife or older.
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Keeping Blood Pressure in Check: The Latest… News Continued…
The research was conducted by a team from China and Tulane University and was presented at the American Heart Association’s 2011 Scientific Sessions. It included more than 1,900 Chinese men and women (average age 38) with a family history of stage 1 hypertension who were taking part in a large project to find out more about salt sensitivity. Stage 1 hypertension is considered blood pressure that reads between 140/90 to 159/99. The subjects also supplied information via questionnaire about how physically active they were.
The subjects followed two one week eating plans; one was limited to 3,000 milligrams of salt daily, the other to a far more generous 18,000 milligrams per day. If a subjects’ blood pressure went up by 5% from the lower to higher salt intake diets, they were considered salt sensitive. The team found that the more active a subject was, the less likely they were to be salt sensitive.
The participants that got the most physical activity had a 38% reduced risk of being salt sensitive compared to those who performed the least amount of regular exercise. The researchers believe that the results suggest a need for sedentary people to be eating a low salt diet to help manage their high blood pressure.
More work needs to be done to see if the health benefits of exercise and salt sensitivity apply to other populations, but experts expect they will. In the meantime, getting active is one of the best things you can do for yourself, and your heart. Being inactive is known to contribute to your risk, and is well within your control to change. All you need to do is get up and get moving.
