NEW YORK (TheStreet) — According to an American Heart Association survey, one out of every three, or 77.9 million, adults in the United States have high blood pressure — and it's only getting worse.
By 2030, 41.4 per cent of adults in the U.S. are expected to have high blood pressure.
Why would that be so serious?
Nearly 28 percent of Americans do not even know they are suffering from the disease. It's called the "silent killer" because high blood pressure , or hypertension, is a very hard-to-detect cardiovascular disorder. The signs and symptoms are subtle.
Hypertension is the leading cause of death in Americans, as a significant risk factor for heart disease and stroke. It is one of the most preventable diseases — but it can raise the risk of life-threatening health issues like a heart attack or a stroke if left uncontrolled.
What is hypertension?
Blood pressure tests the blood force pressing the walls of the arteries toward it. Through each pulse, your blood pressure rises and falls as your heart relaxes in between beats.
Although the number may fluctuate with changes in posture, exercise, stress or food from minute to minute, this should usually be less than 120/80 mmHg. Anything higher and your doctor would diagnose you with high blood pressure. (Hg is the pressure exerted by one millimetre (mm) of mercury ( Hg).
The good news: By changing their diet most people can bring down their blood pressure naturally. Nutrition matters.
Using data gathered from WedMD, Healthline.com and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention we have assembled a list of 15 foods to avoid if you have high blood pressure or just want to reduce the risk of having high blood pressure.
Read on to keep your heart happy and safe.
(Warning: this list may include foods you enjoy eating)
Processed deli and lunch meats that you buy for making sandwiches will easily turn into a sodium pit.
Deli meats are usually dried, seasoned, and salted to last longer. A two-unce serving of some lunch meats may contain approximately 600 milligrams or more of sodium.
A plain sandwich is no longer so innocent when you add the two slices of bread, cheese, some condiments, and pickles.
This is for sodium. Some foodstuffs could contain sodium worth more than two days!
Broccoli beef, which doesn't sound too bad, packs about 3,200 mg of salt. Ingredients used to cook the dish, including soy sauce or teriyaki sauce, contain around 1,000 mg of sodium in only one spoonful. And think about all the oil used to toss the beef and broccoli around. There is an explanation why even the chinese food's sautéed vegetables still look so vivid.
Also soups are potentially shockingly unhealthy. At PF Chang's has a bowl of hot and sour soup, get this ... Salt: 7,980 mg. Wow ...... wow.
It's a simple , cheap dinner, isn't it? All you need to do is turn your oven on to 425 degrees, and put that baby in until the cheese begins melting and the crust turns golden brown.
But if you watch your sodium intake frozen pizzas are bad news. The mix of cheese, cured meat, tomato sauce, and crust adds up the milligrams pretty easily. What's worse is that the manufacturers put a lot of salt in the freezer to retain all that taste. One serving of frozen pizza can contain as much as 1,000 milligrams of sodium, and you know you've never had any remaining frozen pizza, which means you 're probably eating even more.
Those packed glossy sweet goods that sometimes come with colorful icing and sprinkles are enticing, but with salted saturated fats, sugar, and sodium-rich leavening agents, they are anything but good for you. Eating too many baked goods frequently like pastries, cakes, and cookies can also lead to obesity, which aggravates the high blood pressure problem further. This is a no.
Sodium is mounted on both canned tomato sauce and canned tomato juice. One cup of tomato juice contains 680 milligrams of sodium, and one meat-sauce serving of spaghetti contains 1,300 milligrams of sodium.
To make matters worse, having only one serving of tomato sauce is hard, since having only one serving of pasta is even harder. Most Americans don't know that a half cup of cooked pasta is one serving of pasta. Restaurants serve four cups of pasta per dish on a daily basis which is a whopping 8 servings.
A broad Texas steak that has salt for dinner is a no-no.
A balanced diet plan should include only a minimal, if any, amount of saturated or trans-fat. Fatty foods are bad for both the blood vessels and the heart. One 18 oz. The LongHorn Steakhouse ribeye has about 1140 calories, 79 grams of fat and 1,500 mg of sodium without any sauces. Yikes: Yikes.
Here is a no-no which is less apparent. It is low in calories and a way of adding vegetables to a bratwurst, but in one serving it also has over 460 mg of sodium.
Go on your hot dog, without the condiment. Better still, don't have a hot dog either, since it's a processed meat that contains nitrates and is also high in sodium. And then that would remove the ability to eat sauerkraut — maybe.
Ramen noodles, cup noodles or any other pre-packaged noodle meal are common among college students and lazy adults but are extremely harmful to your body.
One generic ramen noodle box contains 14 grams of fat and a whopping 1580 mg of sodium. The tiny package of flavours that comes with it is the biggest culprit, containing most sodium.
All love happy hour, but alcohol intake significantly raises blood pressure. It also affects the walls of the blood vessels while raising the likelihood of more complications at the same time making it a bad option for high blood pressure adults.
Do it not. Beer bellies are not sweet.
Bacon, to be reasonably honest, is mostly fat. Three slices have 4.5 grams of fat and around 270 mg of sodium, and at breakfast or in those B.L.T. sandwiches, most people eat even more.
These days it is difficult to be a meat lover, isn't it?
Oh no! Oh no! If you have high blood pressure or simply want to be a better person, the donuts you enjoy are also one of the foods to avoid. The fried dough snack in ring-shaped form is worse than many other snacks on the market. And no, you can't just have one because with 42 per cent fat and 54 per cent carbohydrates, one donut can have more than 300 calories.
Being fried, it includes plenty of trans and saturated fats — more trans fat than peanut butter, chocolate bars or even chips. For all these reasons and more, a safe heart wants to stop donuts.
In addition to about 35 grams of fat, a single serving of pot pie contains about 1.400 mg of sodium. That's more than 50% of your recommended daily intake for both, and in a single serving. Even the fat contains trans fat, which must be completely removed from the diet, and an excessive dose of saturated fat.
Clean your freezer and say no to frozen meals prepackaged beforehand.
You didn't expect this one to be on the list, did you?
Milk is a fantastic source of calcium but, like whole milk, high-fat dairy products provide you with more fat than you need. One serving cup of whole milk has about 8 grams of fat, of which 5 grams are saturated. Saturated fats are worse than other forms for you, and have been associated with heart disease.
Try using 2 percent milk or 1 percent or skim, much better.
For people with high blood pressure the right meal for those cold rainy days is far from ideal. A cup of canned chicken noodle soup contains, on average, as much as 760 mg sodium.
Eat a whole can, making around two and a half servings, will have you gulping 1,800 mg of sodium down.
Except for the fact that it is filled with sodium, the crunchy, low-calorie snack is a perfect compliment to your sandwich order.
Three medium pickles, around 3.75 inches long, can have about 2,355 mg of sodium for a whole day, more than the recommended 2,300 mg sodium maximum.
Are you trying to stop those foods for a healthy heart? Do you agree with the list of foods? Use the comment section below to let us know your thoughts.