Cut down on salt to improve your blood pressure

Cutting down on salt is one of the easiest ways to make a difference to your blood pressure.  We all eat too much of it and in the UK we eat an average of 9g per day when we really should be eating no more than 6g.  The problem is not really in the salt that we add to our food – although it makes sense to cut that out – try using a product like Lo-Salt – if you cannot do without the flavour on your chips.  The problem is in the amount of processed food that we eat.  Salt is in so many things that it is very easy to come to the end of the day and find you have far exceeded the recommended intake of salt.  Take bread for example.  Each slice of bread you eat contains about 1/2g of salt – and some of the speciality breads you might buy are even worse.  Other things like soup, biscuits, ketchup and ready meals contain vast amounts of salt.  It is important, if you are serious about cutting salt out of your diet, that you start to read labels and get to grip with the hidden salt that you are eating – it accounts for around 80% of the salt you eat each day.

Salt helps raise your blood pressure by encouraging your body to hold on to water.  The more salt you eat, the more you retain water.  The more water you retain the higher your blood pressure becomes.  Also, if you are on blood pressure medications like a diuretic, salt decreases the impact of the medicine.