Solutions

Lose weight. Think of your heart as a pump that's designed to keep a medium-size home stocked with liquid. Now imagine that you have hooked that poor little pump up to a condominium complex instead of a medium-size home. Fat is alive. Fat is very vascular. It needs blood. So having extra fat makes the heart do extra work. To quickly get a rough estimate of your healthy weight, grab a calculator. Multiply your weight in pounds by 700, divide that number by your height in inches, then divide again by your height. If the answer is 25 or above, you are overweight. Dropping just 10 percent of those pounds will do your blood pressure some serious good.

Fill up on fruits and vegetables. Researches have long suspected that nutrients found in both fruits and vegetables - such as magnesium, fiber, and potassium - could lower blood pressure. The problem is that supplement pills that provided the nutrients typically did not reduce blood pressure. The only exception is potassium supplements. Then they tried a different approach. In one study, instead of supplements, researches fed people foods naturally high in those nutrients. In the people with high blood pressure. systolic blood pressure dropped 7.2 points and diastolic 2.8. We don't know if it is potassium, magnesium, or fiber. What we can say is that fruits and vegetables can be beneficial even in persons with lower levels of blood pressure.

To get the same benefit, you will need to work 8 to 10 daily servings of fruits and vegetables into your diet, more than double the national average and three servings more than the minimum government recommendation. Any whole fruit or vegetable, a half-cup of chopped produce, an eight-ounce glass of fruit juice, or a cup of leafy greens all count as one serving.

Be a dairy king. People who are 8 to 10 daily servings of vegetables saw even larger blood pressure drops when they improved their diet in other ways. This diet provided two to three servings of low-fat foods and that you eat and drink dairy products rather than calcium supplements.

Watch what you stick up your nose. Chronic use of some over-the-counter nasal sprays can constrict blood vessels all over your body, making your heart pump faster to get the blood through. Nasal sprays can provide temporary relief from allergies and colds by constricting the blood vessels in the nose, thus opening up passageways. But many people get addicted to the sprays, eventually squirting much more up their noses than they should. The nasal spray vasoconstriction is so powerful that their use can render prescription blood pressure - lowering medication ineffective. If you are addicted to the sprays and can't quit cold turkey, give prescription nasal sprays a try. They won't make your blood pressure rise.

Cut back on salt. You probably have read about various conflicting studies on sodium restriction. The truth is that some people are salt-sensitive. Some are not. African-Americans usually are more salt-sensitive that Whites. Other than race, doctors have no way of figuring out who is who. So stay on the safe side and ban the shaker from the table and cut back on high-salt foods such as canned soups.