Healty Lifestyle!

Lifestyle measures can help you maintain normal blood pressure.

• Follow a healthy eating plan. This includes limiting the amount of sodium (salt) and alcohol that you consume. An example of a healthy eating plan is the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH).
• Lose weight if you're overweight or obese.
• Do enough physical activity.
• Quit smoking.
• Manage your stress and learn to cope with stress

Many people who take one or more of these steps are able to prevent or delay HBP. The more steps you take, the more likely you are to lower your blood pressure and avoid related health problems.

Children and Teens

A healthy lifestyle also can help prevent HBP in children and teens. Key steps include having a child:

• Follow a healthy eating plan that focuses on plenty of fruits, vegetables, and, for children older than 4 years, low-fat dairy products. The plan also should be low in saturated and trans fats and salt.
• Be active for at least 1 to 2 hours per day. Limit screen time in front of the TV or the computer to 2 hours per day at most.
• Maintain a healthy weight. If your child is overweight, ask his or her doctor about how your child can safely lose weight.

Make these habits part of a family health plan to help your child adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Dark chocolate

Feeding chocolate to a bunch of middle-age, overweight people for weeks on end may not be as unhealthy as it seems. Researchers found that six weeks of daily consumption of a dark chocolate cocoa mix significantly improved the blood vessel health of those who participated in the study.

Green tea extract

The heart healthy reputation of epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), the main extract from green tea, may be due in part to improvement in blood flow through the vessels, suggests a clinical trial from the US.

EGCG acutely improves endothelial function in humans with coronary artery disease, and may account for a portion of the beneficial effects of flavonoid-rich food on endothelial function.

Black tea

A new study suggests that black tea reverses endothelial vasomotor dysfunction in patients with coronary artery disease, which reduces the risk for heart attack and stroke in these patients.

If you take a group of people with heart disease who have abnormal blood vessel function to begin with and asked them to drink tea, their blood vessels improved.

Flavanols may improve smokers' blood vessel health

Flavanols, the natural chemicals found in chocolate, fruits and tea, can boost the levels of nitric oxide in the blood of smokers and reverse some of the smoking-related damage to blood vessels.

Previous research has already shown that flavonols protect blood vessel health and it is therefore thought that they should benefit the heart. But the new study demonstrates these benefits in smokers, people that have raised risk of heart disease.