Here's the good news first - the average blood pressure level in people around the world has fallen. As good as it is to hear that, there still are some holdouts who find it hard to take control of their blood pressure problems. One of the most important things you can do to control high blood pressure that seems impervious to all your well-intentioned attempts would be to deal with the salt in your food. For a healthy blood pressure count, you need to make sure that there are no more than 1.5 teaspoons of salt in your diet a day. In America, we end up taking in almost 2 teaspoons of salt a day. If you're hastily mentally totaling up all the salt that you sprinkle over your food and spoon into the bubbling pot on the stove everyday, you would be surprised to know that that isn't where you make your mistake. Three-quarters of the salt we eat every day comes from other places. What other places? They're pretty well hidden.
Let's start with a product that really is innocuous as far as its effects on your blood pressure go - it's Kellogg's raisin bran. They advertise on the box that a serving of Raisin Bran gives you no more than 15% of your daily dietary allowance. While that sounds pretty modest, that's twice as much as almost every other cereal- Cheerios, Special K Protein Plus or anything else. How about that nutritious snack that you would prefer your child chose over junk food - beef jerky? Even the mild variety has a full 500mg to a serving - probably not the healthiest snack ever at twice the salt content of even a serving of potato chips. You eat a little bit of this, and you'll get a fifth of your daily recommended 1.5 teaspoon allowance of salt.
Certainly, your efforts trying to control high blood pressure can't have anything to do with your hankering for pancakes, now could it? Take a package of Kellogg's Eggo pancakes (perhaps they wouldn't sell as well if they called them Ego pancakes). Delicious as these are, would you believe that you get a whopping 500mg of sodium to the package? It's a full quarter of your daily allowance of salt. The syrup that comes with the package is even more salty goodness. But that is nothing compared to what looks like an otherwise very healthy snack - a vegetarian burger by MorningStar Farms. Here, you are buying one of these in the hope that you're doing the right thing for your health staying away from beef patties in your burgers. That would be a reasonable assumption - except for the fact that some of these have whopping amounts of salt - a full third per burger of your allowance. If you go low-salt, you aren't safe comforting yourself with gobs of ketchup either. Most major brands of ketchup are so heavily laced with salt that you would get about 100mg off just 1 tablespoon of the stuff.
Any attempt to control high blood pressure starts with the processed foods you buy. That's where most of the salty action is.
