Flutterby™! : Blood pressure

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Blood pressure

2007-04-23 21:48:35.562558+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Okay, I've got a silly question: My systolic blood pressure often runs a little high, in the 130 range (my diastolic is usually 70-80), and although I haven't got enough data to correlate it yet (ie: is it really lower all the rest of the time?), every once in a while (year or two) I'll get a spontaneous nose bleed, check my blood pressure, and be up around 140.

Of course I go out and get some exercise and I'm at 111/69 or so (at least according to our little battery powered sphygmomanometer), but I'm wondering what else I should be doing. And by that I'm meaning "yeah, yeah, I've seen the usual list of the usual suspects, but those sources were generally wrong about cholesterol (ie: 'saturated fats' was the wrong classification, and fructose is at least as nasty as anything else) and I already don't eat any trans fats and am fairly low on the refined flours and sugars", so where's the research pointing towards the most likely culprits?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food Physiology ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2007-04-24 02:15:05.815991+00 by: Ben Williams

I have pretty much the exact same situation but mine started out a little bit higher. Everything I've read and been told indicates that the biggest culprits are smoking and being overweight, but that probably isn't much help here. You probably have essential hypertension, which just means high blood pressure with no identifiable cause. The non-drug things that have worked for me are following the DASH diet and getting more cardio exercise. My doctor sent me to a cardiologist and he was more aggressive about treatment than my PCP. Obviously you should see your doctor if you haven't already

#Comment made: 2007-04-24 12:11:14.432831+00 by: markd

And don't forget stress. I find a correlation to my BP and how generally uptight I am.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-04-24 15:33:53.455927+00 by: Dan Lyke

No smoking (no tobacco ever, none of the other stuff for quite a while, and even then it was only an every several months at most kind of thing), I am back up to 16% body fat, but I'm kinda doubting that that qualifies as "overweight".

The one thing that might get me is salt intake, but I'm suspicious of all of the things that finger sodium because salt is easily expelled if you're drinking enough water, so I suspect that (much like fructose and low-density lipoproteins) there's a secondary trigger somewhere there that's more healthy to change. As the various studies say, salt has a solid link to high blood pressure, but there's no long-term data about the negative effects of a severely salt restricted diet...

And my diet's probably pretty close to the DASH diet already.

So it's probably mostly about stress and how I handle it. I'll keep the blood pressure machine out and handy and use that as yet another device in my self-monitoring regime.