Blood pressure needs to be high enough to get blood to every cell in our body. The ideal number has been determined to be 120/80 mm of Mercury. This is the systolic pressure and diastolic pressure. Blood pressure is measured in the brachial ( arm) arteries. It's just the most convenient place to measure it. Systolic pressure is the pressure in our arteries when our heart pumps blood and is always higher. Diastolic pressure is when our heart relaxes. So, the pressure is on the lower side. The large arteries are flexible blood vessels that expand to take in all the blood when the heart pumps. Then they contract to push blood all around the body. So, they are like secondary blood pumps with heart being the primary one.
When the blood pressure is higher than 140/90, it is called hypertension [1]. Hypertension is a condition that falls under the category of silent killer. Many people don't know that they have hypertension until it's too late. Let's start with the salient question, why does our blood pressure rise? As always with our body, there is no single cause but many.
Let's start with salt as it is something we can potentially change. We started consuming salt out of necessity once we found out that adding salt to food and letting the salted food to dry under the sun preserves food for a longer time. Dried salted fish, meat and vegetables became part of our diet whenever fresh food was not available and helped us survive. We also happened to find out that salt in our regular diet enhances the taste of our food. There is even a saying in tamil that a food without salt should be thrown away. But salt was a luxury. There was a time when people were paid in salt. In fact, the word salary is derived from the Latin word for salt. All that changed when we started producing salt in huge quantities during the Industrial Revolution and made salt cheap.
Hypertension on epidemic scale is a new phenomenon though[2]. It's because of the proliferation of cheap processed foods. Food companies found that addictive nature of salt can be used to make us consume more food than our needs. When we eat salt, the salt concentration in our blood increases. To maintain the balance in our blood, the body retains more liquid in the blood. Now the body has more volume of blood which has to be pumped around the body for which extra pressure is needed. For healthy folks, the kidneys remove the extra salt and liquid. But for many others, sustained high pressure damages the various arteries in our body. Depending on the organs that get blood from the damaged artery we get various diseases like heart disease, kidney disease, etc.,
Most of us don't have any need for preserving food using salt as we have refrigerators at home. Any additional salt is purely for taste and must be reduced as much as possible. We can begin with finding out how much salt is used in our house daily. For reference, 1 teaspoon equals 3 grams. Natural foods do contains salt. For millions of years, that's how we met our daily requirement of less than 1 gm.That's what we need to get back to. We have seen a drastic blood pressure drop in our customers by stopping addition of salt to their food. The only way to do it is to cook food from scratch at home daily. Let's take back control of what goes in our food.
If you find yourself addicted to salt and unable to cut down, there's an alternative. Work out under the hot sun in such a way that you sweat profusely. Salt is excreted in the sweat without damaging our kidneys.
[1] European Society of Cardiology and the European Society of Hypertension
[2] National Family Health Survey 2020-21 (NFHS-5), India
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