Nutrition/Blood Pressure

The Friday nutrition session focused on blood pressure, something which I take daily medication for and which I'm hoping to improve.

Claudia started by emphasizing that nutrition is not a cure but can be an amazing tool in the management of this condition. She started the session by talking about the risk factors associated with hypertension:

• weight issues resulting in an unhealthy body weight 
• lack of exercise 
• too much alcohol 
• too much caffeine 
• stress, and
• smoking 

I have four things on the list to consider - weight, exercise, caffeine, and stress. I've already started working on weight and exercise, so I now also need to consider stress and caffeine. I think any current stress is as a result of the pandemic and lockdown so although I can't do anything about the cause, I can maybe deal with my response to the cause. However, I don't feel that my stress levels are currently too bad so I intend to just go with the flow on that aspect of life for now.

Where I can make an immediate change is to reduce the amount of caffeine I have. I only drink black coffee, not too strong, but have more mugs of coffee during the day than is ideal. The advice is to change to decaffeinated, aiming for a brand that uses the Swiss Water method to decaffeinate the coffee beans. Apparently this is the purest method for the decaffeination process and doesn't include the chemicals used in some of the decaffeinated brands. So, my first task is to find a suitable brand of both coffee beans and instant coffee ... any ideas, please?

The chat then moved on to the dietary approach to managing hypertension. There are two recommended plans - the Mediterranean Diet, and the DASH Diet, and it turns out that the changes I have made in response to the diabetes scare means that I am already following the DASH diet. It's rather a relief to be on the right track for once!

Claudia explained that the UK recommended 5 a day for fruit and veg is not enough. The UK settled on 5 portions a day because at the time, the UK average was only 2 portions and it was felt that the increase to 5 portions was enough! It should have been 7 portions a day and Claudia recommended 2 portions of fruit with breakfast, 3 portions of vegetables with lunch and 3 portions of vegetables with dinner. It's better to have the fruit at the start of the day as this helps with the management of blood sugars. The other recommendation is that meat, poultry, and fish should be reduced to fewer than 2 portions a day and that the diet should include vegetarian meals every day. 

The session ended with a Q&As which didn't entirely stick to hypertension, but still interesting. There was some discussion about when to eat organic fruit and veg. I didn't list any of them but the lists can be found here, produced annually and to do with the use and absorption of  pesticides - the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15.