Watch Your Blood Pressure

What you need to know to keep your numbers down

There’s no leeway for individual differences or borderline numbers. “You can’t say 140/90 is normal for you,” Merkle says. “If you have diabetes, your blood pressure should be below 130/80, no matter what. If you can reduce it to 120/80, that’s even better."

What You Can Do for Yourself

Although your doctor may have prescribed medication to lower your blood pressure, you can help yourself with healthy habits. Merkle provides these tips:

• Avoid adding any salt to your food and buy low-sodium products when you shop.
  
• Choose foods with less than 400 milligrams (mg) of sodium per serving.
  
• Limit total daily salt or sodium intake to about 2500 milligrams (about one teaspoon) a day from all sources—prepared foods, the natural salt content of some foods and the salt shaker.

Think you can’t live without salt? “Even die-hard salt fans get used to the taste of unsalted foods after a week or so,” Merkle says.

Get moving. “Although physical activity may raise blood pressure at first, it actually improves blood-vessel tone (and blood flow) over the long term,” Merkle says. Another bonus: It helps you lose weight! “It’s important to be physically active for 45 to 60 minutes most days of the week,” he says.

Quit smoking. "Smoking injures your blood vessels, and diabetes injures them even further," Merkle says. "When you add high blood pressure to that, you get a cumulative effect that leads straight to vascular disease." If you need help quitting smoking see the related link.

What Your Doctor Can Do for You

Your doctor has hundreds of medications to choose from to treat high blood pressure, including two major classes of drugs: ACE inhibitors (angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors) and ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers). These medications open up and relax blood vessels by controlling amounts of angiotensin (ann-gee-o-TEN-sin), a chemical that causes blood vessels to tighten up, limiting blood flow. “We use these drugs separately and together, and they work extremely well,” Merkle says. “They don’t produce the side effects that many older medications did.”

ARTICLE TOOLS: