If you’re wondering how to lower blood pressure quickly, thankfully, for most people, there really are effective ways to accomplish this without risky prescription medications or expensive surgery. What’s good blood pressure anyway? A normal, low blood pressure reading taken at a sitting, with a monitor placed firmly on the arm, should be 120/ 80. Higher numbers indicate that your blood volume is higher than normal, and lower numbers indicate that your blood volume is lower than normal.
If you want to know how to lower blood pressure quickly, start by lowering your total body weight. Obesity is recognized as one of the risk factors for hypertension. Obesity raises your resting heart rate and lowers your resting metabolic rate, contributing to increased blood volume. The result is higher blood pressures at resting. If you are overweight, you can lower your hypertension simply by losing excess weight. You can eat healthily to reduce your overall weight, and start to exercise regularly to increase your physical activity.
The amount of sodium in your diet is also an important factor in determining hypertension. The average American consumes about two pounds of salt per day, more than half the recommended daily intake. Excessive sodium contributes to fluid retention, which in turn increases your systolic and diastolic blood pressures. To help reduce hypertension, you should follow a diet plan that reducing sodium intake and increases potassium intake.
Another dietary approach that can help you lower your blood pressure is the so-called DASH diet (Dietary Approaches for Stopping Hypertension). This is a program developed by the American Heart Association that advocates a low-salt, low-sugared, high-fiber diet as the best dietary approaches for lowering hypertension. The DASH diet recommends that you include fruits, vegetables, cereals, breads, beans and legumes, milk, eggs and poultry with skin, low-fat dairy products, whole grain breads, fish, low-fat meat and poultry products, and low-fat dairy products.
These dietary approaches to lower blood pressure do not contain substances that cause negative side effects. In fact, most of them to improve your health condition, because they improve potassium levels in the body. Potassium is a key mineral that helps maintain blood vessel functioning and helps stimulate the nervous system. Therefore, potassium supplements are often recommended as dietary approaches to lower blood pressures.
However, there is one medication that is commonly prescribed by doctors to treat hypertension – ACE inhibitors. ACE inhibitors are usually prescribed to people with severe heart problems. Doctors often prefer to give these drugs to these patients because they have lower risks of side effects, especially compared to other approaches. The one medication associated with hypertension that can be taken by almost anyone is the potassium channel blockers.