Got High Cholesterol? You Need the High Blood Pressure-Beating Diet
If you have been diagnosed with high cholesterol, it’s almost certain that you have been advised by your physician that you need to make some changes to your diet. Probably what you have been advised to do is to wherever possible avoid alcohol, fat, and salt.
While dietary changes are necessary for the vast majority of people suffering from high cholesterol, the problem with only being told what not to do is that it doesn’t necessarily make it any clearly what you should do. In other words, just because you now know what foods to avoid, doesn’t make you immediately able to design a diet for yourself that contains good, tasty food that won’t exacerbate your condition.
Luckily you can do something about it. Here we present some great high blood pressure-beating diet tips to get your taste buds tingling and to kick-start you on the path to eating well in order to combat high cholesterol:
- Fruit
Let’s start with the basics: 2-3 servings of fruit per day are a sweet treat you can enjoy guilt free on the high blood pressure-beating diet.
- Vegetables
Bet you saw this one coming! Vegetables are an absolutely essential source of nutrients, so 2-3 servings per day are an essential part of the high blood pressure-beating diet. (See ‘Fresh food’, below, for serving tips).
- Skim milk
Providing it’s not high in fat, milk really is a wonder food. It’s tasty and satisfying, and it’s full of protein that you need for muscle repair. Skim milk makes a great snack because it’s so easy to ‘prepare’: just unscrew the lid or open the carton! If you want to, you can even drink it straight from the container – go on, we won’t tell anyone. We recommend about 2-3 glasses per day.
- Complex carbohydrates
Carbohydrates are an essential part of nearly ever diet (Dr Atkins, we’re looking at you). What’s important though, is that all or most of the carbohydrates you eat are complex carbs. This means foods such as brown bread, and wholemeal pasta and rice.
- Fresh food
Here we come to the first of our broad tips for the high blood pressure-beating diet: eat more fresh foods. Prepared food that you buy is very often high in salt, even if it doesn’t taste that way, and cooking food in general can introduce fat and salt, even when you do it yourself.
- Substitute salt in your cooking
We’re not going to try to argue with you: salt tastes good! Unfortunately, there’s no place for it in the high blood pressure-beating diet. What you need to do is first of all to recognize how much salt is hidden in sauces and flavorings. It’s probably no surprise that soy sauce is high in salt, but did you know that barbecue sauce and mustard are also high in salt? What about canned soup and stock cubes? Once you have worked out how much salt is in the things that you cook with, you can start looking for substitutes. Instead of salt and salty sauces, try adding instead more herbs and spices. Garlic, chili, ginger and lemon are all great flavors you can use to replace salt. These are just a couple of tips of how you can control your high blood pressure.