What the heck is ....... High Blood Pressure
You know high blood pressure is bad, but you probably have a little trouble getting your head around the whole concept of how ‘blood pressure’ works. Can’t we just let a little of the blood out and lower the pressure? If only it was so easy.
When most people think of blood pressure, they think in terms of garden hose: too much pressure and the hose, unless you open the valve. But that model is too simple. It helps instead to think of your circulatory system as more like the Grand Union Canal – a series of locks and gates that help blood move around where it’s needed. See, gravity works on your blood just like it works on the rest of your body: it wants to pull everything downwards. So imagine you hopping out of bed tomorrow morning and standing up. Gravity wants to take all the blood that’s distributed throughout your body and pull it down into your feet. You, on the other hand, would like that blood to pump to your brain, where it can help you figure out where the hell your keys are.
On cue, arteries in the lower body constrict while the heart dramatically increases output. The instant result: blood pressure rises, and flows to the brain. Ahh, there they are – in the dog’s water dish, right where you left them.
It’s an ingenious system, but that’s incredibly easy to throw out of whack. When you pack on extra padding around your gut, your heart pumps harder to force blood into all the new fatty tissue. When you nosh on crisps and other high – sodium foods, your body retains water in order to dilute the excess salt, increasing overall blood volume. When you line your arteries with plaque from too many fatty meals, pressure increases as the same amount of blood has to squeeze through newly narrowed vessels. When you let the pressures of the day haunt you into the night, your brain pumps out stress hormones that keep your body in perpetual state of fight-or-flight anxiousness, also forcing your heart to pump harder. High-salt, high-fat diets and an excess of stress all combine to create a dangerous situation.