If you’ve got high blood pressure, conventional wisdom says to watch your salt intake. This advice has many people reducing the salt they add to dishes while cooking and eating. However, a few sprinkles of salt at the table aren’t going to make much difference if the dish you’re eating is unfriendly to hypertension in the first place. Many processed foods are so full of additives and other toxic ingredients that they’re a recipe for a huge blood pressure spike. Here’s a look at five foods to avoid if you’ve got hypertension.
Lunch meat
Lunch meat is loaded with sodium. The meats are cured, seasoned with salt and preserved using even more salt to help them last longer. As a result, just a 2-ounce serving of cold cuts can contain more than 600 milligrams of sodium. Of course, people rarely eat deli meat in isolation, so you’re often having other high-sodium foods with it, like the pickles, cheese and condiments on your sandwich.
Canned soups
You might not add salt to canned soup once you serve it, but the odds are already stacked against you. A 305-gram can of chicken soup’s sodium content tips the scales at 1,910 milligrams! Thankfully, soup is one of the easiest foods you can make at home, and you can control the salt content by using fresh ingredients and adding the minimum amount of table salt needed to make it palatable.
Red meat
A rib-eye steak might be delicious, but that great taste comes with a high price for your heart and blood vessels. Its sodium and cholesterol content are high enough raw, but they can increase depending on how you cook the meat, making this one food you should try to stay away from if blood pressure is a concern.
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Chinese food
It’s awfully convenient to stop for Chinese food at the end of a busy day when you need to get food on the table, but its sodium content is astronomical. According to Foods for Better Health, some Chinese dishes have more than two days’ worth of sodium in them. For example, beef with broccoli has roughly 3,200 milligrams of salt, while seemingly healthier soups like hot and sour have 7,980 milligrams of salt. There’s about a gram of sodium in each tablespoon of soy sauce, too. When you add this to the high calorie content of most Chinese food and the fact that much of it is fried, this is clearly a category of food to avoid.
Bacon
Bacon is packed with sodium, and even the reduced-sodium varieties contain 1,030 milligrams of sodium and more than 100 milligrams of cholesterol in a 100-gram serving. Making matters worse is the fact that bacon is typically a side; you’re usually having it along with a salty main course.
Are you noticing a theme here? Most of the foods on this list contain toxic ingredients and chemicals like MSG and nitrates, which can destroy your health. The consumption of processed meat, which is loaded with preservatives like nitrates and nitrites, has been linked to a higher risk of developing breast cancer and colon cancer, while MSG can cause organ damage and obesity. Studies have shown that eating just 50 grams of processed meat per day is enough to raise your colorectal cancer risk by 18 percent.
Did you also notice what’s missing from the list? Natural, whole plant foods like organic fruits and vegetables! It should come as no surprise that these nutrient-packed foods are perfectly safe choices for those with high blood pressure, not to mention excellent for your overall health, so be sure to eat them every day!
Sources for this article include:
FoodsForBetterHealth
Cancer.org
