Healthy Eating

tgfarmer63

Little help please.
Trying to clean up my diet, mainly for overall health, but focusing on Blood Pressure, and Kidney health. Just turned 60. In decent shape but need a little guidance.

neanderthin

Eating healthy focusing on blood pressure and kidneys is basically consuming a diet that would be considered a whole food diet where refined carbohydrates, seed oils and sugar are reduced greatly and generally will facilitate lowering of blood pressure and reducing the visceral fat around the kidneys, liver, heart, pancreas, intestines, basically everywhere and improving pretty much all inflammatory markers. Weight loss will further enhance the situation and if your obese then weight loss should be your focus, it's the best bang for the buck. Personally I'm low carb for health reasons but any diet that focuses on whole foods like the Med diet for example is good. Vegetarian or vegan no so much. cheers.

Corina1143

Me, too @tgfarmer63
I wish I could leave the processed food alone, but it's so hard, considering current lifestyles.
And of course, considering I love all food!
I just started taking blood pressure medication a year ago, wish I could get off it.

loulee997

tgfarmer63 wrote: »

Little help please.
Trying to clean up my diet, mainly for overall health, but focusing on Blood Pressure, and Kidney health. Just turned 60. In decent shape but need a little guidance.

Check with your doctor first---but ask them if adding Vitamin D3 or a Magnesium supplement might help your blood pressure. For some people, these help heart strength and help lower blood pressure. BUT--you should NOT just add them to your life without checking with your doc first.

I'm sure you are reducing sodium. If you have a day where excess sodium is unavoidable, try adding some potassium foods (such as a banana) to your dinner. Potassium helps even out sodium intake. Not a cure but can sometimes help offset some of the sodium.

Replace your salt with other spices or seasonings so that your food keeps a good flavor.

tgfarmer63

Thanks loulee997. Good thing, for the most part I can leave processed foods alone when I’m home, but I travel and stay in hotels quite a bit, a little more challenging, but making adjustments. I’ll definitely talk to my doc. Cardiologist put me on potassium, but not magnesium. The reason I mentioned Kidney health, I read an article about kidneys and blood pressure, who knew, kidneys play a big part in regulating BP. I guess so much of it boils down to getting my diet straight. Thoughts?

tgfarmer63

Thanks neanderthin,
Fighting the carb war is a tough one. I’ve done keto, but discovered low carb is not the way to go. My goal is 130 per day, which isn’t easily done. I’m getting better at navigating the sodium and sugar minefields. It’s tough when traveling but do fairly well at home. Not terribly overweight, need to lose about 10-15 pounds, get back to the weight I was when I retired from the Army in 2005. Bad part about it is, I know most of the answers to the test, but it seems like I’m putting the right answer to the wrong question. 🙂 thanks again for your reply

EricExtreme

Corina1143 wrote: »

Me, too @tgfarmer63
I wish I could leave the processed food alone, but it's so hard, considering current lifestyles.
And of course, considering I love all food!
I just started taking blood pressure medication a year ago, wish I could get off it.

It's easy to say this, but if processed foods aren't in the house I can't eat them. I only purchase whole foods and pre-prepare meals for the week so I only have healthy whole foods available to eat.

MsCzar

Greatly reducing your sugar and highly processed foods intake is probably the best thing you could do for yourself.

henridw2095

The other factor in controlling BP is exercise…how that would look depends on how much you currently exercise.

Agreed with whole foods / low salt diet otherwise.