It's the last week of the year. Time to make New Year's resolutions. The most common resolution is to lose weight. Another good resolution is to improve your blood pressure if you have high blood pressure. A perfect way to start for either of these is to begin a diet of high potassium foods. For most of us a high potassium diet will result in a lower blood pressure. Because of the foods in a high potassium diet, most of us will feel more energetic and lose weight over time.
How Fast To See An Effect
You can see the effect from a high potassium diet on blood pressure within 2 weeks. So you will know right away if it is working. If it is going to help you, you will know before February. If you go on a high potassium diet by eating high potassium foods, you will also lower your sodium intake, since almost all of the high potassium foods have little sodium. You can easily attain the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendation of 4700 mg of potassium and less than 1500 mg of sodium on a high potassium foods diet.
How To Start
How to start? The easiest way is to start with breakfast. You can make smoothies or cooked cereal high potassium by including some of the high potassium foods in the tables we have on the website. Lunch and dinner are easy also.
For lunch, a raw vegetable and a fruit, as well as a few nuts, and some dairy, such as milk to drink, with a small portion of meat or poultry will do. If the food is not highly processed, which often results in a higher sodium load, just taking a portion from each of these groups results in a high potassium diet.
The vegetables table gives you a list to choose from for the vegetable. Just eat the vegetable raw, or steam it, and it will lose no potassium. Boiling it may leach out the potassium. So you should avoid boiling most vegetables. Of course, you can eat fruit raw.
Nuts add a lot of potassium in a small volume, and give healthy fats (unless coconut). Walnuts and macadamias are good choices. Using olive oil for salads provides a healthy fat, but gives no potassium.
Most meats have a favorable potassium to sodium ratio, unless they were injected with sodium for preservation. If you choose from the poultry and fish categories or wild game, you will also be getting healthy fats in an appropriate amount.
And finally, dairy has a favorable potassium to sodium ratio – except for cheese. Cheese generally has much more sodium than potassium and should be avoided or minimized.
A good New Year's resolution is to switch to a high potassium foods diet to reduce blood pressure. It will also help to strengthen your bone density. And over the long run, it will help to bring your weight into the normal range.
