If you wouldn't feel safe flying with the plane's gauges pegged in the red zone. Oh, you could taxi down the runway, take off, and probably remain airborne for a spell. You might even stay up long enough to enjoy an in-flight meal. But the expectation of eventually seeing smoke billowing from the engines, or hearing shards of metal snap off, would fill you with dread.
Strange, then, that most men don't sweat it when their body's most important gauge--blood pressure--rises into the red zone and stays there. "High blood pressure gives you a twofold to fourfold increase in your risk of stroke or heart attack," says Prediman K. Shah, M.D., director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. "And only about one-third of individuals with high blood pressure have it under some sort of control."
The problem is, most of us mistake the early stages of hypertension for completely normal blood pressure. In the past few years, 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) went from being classified as healthy to "prehypertensive" by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The target numbers are now 119/79 mm Hg or lower. To hit that target, and avoid a crash landing, let the steam out of the following "pressure cookers" one at a time.
Your heart and the 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries in your body have enough work to do when you're lean. Don't make matters worse by adding a beer belly, which requires more blood supply, putting additional strain on the heart and raising overall blood pressure. "It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure," says Eric Topol, M.D., chief academic officer of Scripps Health. "By bringing your weight into line with what it should be, you can produce a 10 to 29-point drop in blood pressure," says John Elefteriades, M.D., chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Yale. For men with borderline-high blood pressure, that alone is enough of a drop to eliminate the need for pharmaceutical intervention, he says.
Do This: Eat meat. In a recent Australian study, people with high blood pressure who replaced 8 percent of their daily calories from bread, cereal, potatoes, or pasta with lean red meat experienced a four-point drop in their systolic blood pressure in just 8 weeks. Arginine, an amino acid in red meat, may help dilate blood vessels, lowering blood pressure. Plus, limiting starches lowers blood sugar and makes your body more efficient at burning fat.
Not That: Eat a low-fat diet. Removing fat from your diet could actually work against your goal, because healthy fats are key to lowering blood pressure. For example, a study in the Journal of Medicinal Food found that men who replaced their regular cooking oil with sesame oil for 45 days experienced decreases in their blood pressure and blood sugar. Sesame oil contains polyunsaturated fatty acids and a compound called sesamin, which stops your liver from making cholesterol. Look in the ingredient list on your salad-dressing bottle for sesame oil. We like Annie's Naturals Organic Asian Sesame Dressing, which also contains heart-healthy garlic.
