Controlling Your Blood Pressure Archive

New guidelines to reduce added sodium in food are good news for everyone—not just people with high blood pressure.

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If you’re like most people, chances are you eat far more than the recommended amount of sodium, one of the main components of salt. But cutting back may be a little easier in the future, thanks to the FDA’s recent proposed guidelines to scale down sodium levels in processed and restaurant food.

Health experts consider the move a long-awaited step in the right direction. Strong evidence from more than 100 clinical trials shows that lowering dietary sodium also lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure (hypertension), which affects one in three American adults, is a key culprit in cardiovascular disease.

Every little bit of activity counts — and the first steps toward fitness have the most impact.

 Image source: hhs.gov

Without question, being physically active is the best thing you can do for your heart health. Here's the good news: according to new federal exercise guidelines, even just a few minutes of moving can count toward the recommended aerobic exercise goal of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week.

"Studies show that the total amount of energy expended is what's important for health, not whether it comes in short or long bouts," says Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies the role of physical activity in disease prevention. "This certainly is an encouraging message for people who are inactive," she adds, noting that the previous guidelines recommended exercising in sessions lasting at least 10 minutes.

Research we're watching

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Among people in the United States and other westernized countries, blood pressure readings tend to rise with age. But a new study suggests that's not true for the Yanomami, a tribe of hunter-gatherer-gardeners living in a remote Venezuelan rain forest.

Researchers measured blood pressure in 72 Yanomami people and 83 people from a nearby tribe, the Yekwana. The people ranged in age from 1 to 60 years old. The Yekwana have been slightly "westernized," thanks to missionaries and an airstrip that allows for occasional deliveries of processed food and salt.

Research we're watching

The buildup of fatty plaque in arteries outside of the heart, especially in the legs, is known as peripheral artery disease (PAD). A new study finds that middle-aged adults with optimal scores on a metric of cardiovascular health called "Life's Simple 7" are much less likely than people with less favorable scores to develop PAD.

Developed by the American Heart Association, the Simple 7 score takes into account cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, physical activity, diet, smoking status, and body mass index. For the study, published in the November 2018 American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers followed 12,865 people with an average age of 54 over a median of about 24 years. People with optimal scores or average scores had, respectively, a 91% and 64% lower risk of PAD compared with people whose scores suggested poor health. The findings are similar to or even stronger than previous studies focusing on the predictive power of Life's Simple 7 for heart disease or stroke risk, according to the authors.