Lowering Blood Pressure By Cutting Back On Salt – Is It Based On Sound Science?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about advice for lowering blood pressure?

It’s very likely to be the constant refrain to restrict salt intake. It’s hardly surprising; look at any health or medical website and the first tip you’re likely to see for reducing blood pressure is to “cut back on salt”. We’ve been lectured about this for so long, decades in fact, that salt (sodium) has become inextricably linked to hypertension (high blood pressure).

But is it true? Or could it be that like many things that we’ve heard over and over, it’s just a big fat myth? In other words…

Will cutting your salt intake really help in lowering blood pressure?

That’s a great question that many people (when they stop and think about it) would like to have answered: I mean, let’s say you follow a pretty good diet… do you need to worry about salt?

You see, this whole salt thing has been haunting us since back in the 1970’s, when Lewis Dahl did a study showing that higher salt intake raised the blood pressure of rats in a lab. Of course bad news gets attention and many people took the conclusions of that study at face value and ran with them. But there were serious flaws in the study that were widely overlooked in the zeal to identify a culprit for hypertension.

First of all, the rats were fed an amount of salt equivalent to a human consumption of five hundred GRAMS daily. By contrast, the average human salt intake is around 2500 mg (2.5 grams) per day.

And this wasn’t the only problem with Dahl’s study. Let’s just say it was basically flimsy. But despite this…

Lower Your Blood Pressure by Practicing Yoga

If you didn’t know by now, yoga asanas can help you in the treatment of high blood pressure, and help you lower blood pressure. Yoga asanas make stable your blood pressure, so lower blood pressure when it’s abnormaly high. Asanas have favorable effects on the nervous system. By practicing certain yoga asanas you can not only lower your blood pressure, but also reduce the effects of hypertension on the other organs of the body.

There are a few categories of asanas which are recommended to lower blood pressure: forward bends, sitting, supine and inversions group.

Forward bends have the best effects on high blood pressure, so they can help you the most to lower your blood pressure. These exercises have a calming effect on the brain, the blood circulation to the brain is normalized, and they help you reduce the stress from the sense organs, things that lower blood pressure. So, the brain, the sympathetic nervous system and the sense organs are relaxed, the cardiac output and the pulse rate decelerate at the same time, and blood pressure stabilizes, so it lowers blood pressure when it’s high. Other asanas which have beneficial effects on the nervous system and help you lower blood pressure are Uttanasana and Adhomukha Svanasana , which have to be practiced with the head resting on props, so the blood circulates more freely into the aortic arch. These help you lower blood pressure.

Baddhakonasana and Virasana are some of the sitting asanas which can be practiced in order to get a lower blood pressure by the hypertensives , which in most cases are hard breathing. These poses eliminate the tension from the ribs and the intercostal muscles, so they help you to breathe with no difficulty, and lower blood pressure.