How to Lower Blood Pressure with Diet and Exercise

If your blood pressure is creeping up, the first thing many doctors recommend is not a pill, but a few changes to what you eat and how you move. The American Heart Association says that diet and exercise can lower the top number by ten or more points in a few months, which is enough to bring many people from high blood pressure back to normal. The changes are not fancy. And you do not need a special diet plan or a gym membership. The two most studied changes are eating less salt and walking more, and either one helps on its own.

The DASH diet, which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, was built by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to lower blood pressure. The plan is not a strict diet. It is a way of eating that fills the plate with vegetables, fruit, whole grains, low-fat dairy, fish, chicken, and beans, with small amounts of red meat and sweets. Studies show DASH lowers the top blood pressure number by eight to fourteen points in adults with high readings. The DASH plan does not require special foods. Most of what is on the list is already in the grocery store, and the plan works whether you cook every meal or eat out a few nights a week.

Salt is the other big one. Most Americans eat about thirty-four hundred milligrams of sodium a day, but the American Heart Association recommends fifteen hundred milligrams for people with high blood pressure. The biggest sources of salt are not the salt shaker, but packaged foods like canned soup, deli meat, frozen dinners, and bread. Reading the nutrition label and picking the lower-sodium version of the same food can cut your salt by half without changing how the food tastes much. Look for foods that say "low sodium" or "no salt added" on the label, and rinse canned beans and vegetables under water to wash away extra salt.

Moving the body is the other half. The American Heart Association recommends one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate exercise a week, which works out to about thirty minutes a day, five days a week. Moderate means you can talk but not sing while you move. Walking is the best place to start, because it costs nothing, needs no equipment, and is gentle on the joints. Two fifteen-minute walks count the same as one thirty-minute walk. If walking is hard, water exercise, a stationary bike, or chair exercises also count. Even ten minutes of movement at a time helps. The big number is the total at the end of the week, not the length of any one walk. Combined with the food changes, regular movement can lower blood pressure by another five to ten points in a few months.