Just a pair of numbers, but they matter. They tell you that you're mortal, and that it's way past time to pay attention to all the things you know you should be doing to protect your health.
In this case, 150/100, give or take on any given day.
You have to decide, in the complete absence of observable symptoms, to change your life. Just because of some numbers.
And as you do this, you find out a whole lot about health, the food that you get sold, and yourself.
It's never been a problem, I guess. Any time I went to the doc, they wrapped my arm in that cuff thing, blew it up, and wrote down the numbers. I'm sure they told me each time but I don't remember the results - it must have been fine.
Then one day on work travel there was a blood pressure machine in the meeting room. We all took turns with it. My reading was off the charts.
It now appears that the machine sitting the meeting room was reading high - not exactly accurate. But it did its job. It got my attention.
So what do you do, with a blood pressure number that's too high?
First step, consult with my health care provider. She looks me right in the eye and tells me that the single best thing I can do is lose twenty five pounds. And watch the crap that I eat.
Losing the pounds, that will take a while. So, on to the salt question. Any fool knows that sodium causes high blood pressure. Here we go counting up the sodium.
Wow. That's when I found out where the sodium is - everywhere. That is, pretty much all packaged food.
It doesn't matter if it's organic, or supposed to be healthy. If it's in a box you can pretty much count on a big slug of the old Na.
Take my daughter's favorite mac & cheese. Holy cow! 520 mg per serving, and you know that a "serving" is about how much a Barbie doll would eat if it had an appetite. Then I looked at bottle of iced tea I had bought to take on a backcountry ski trip - 80 mg per barbie-sized serving is 320 for the bottle. Just for some tea!
In their own way, the numbers are good news for me, because I'm a numbers guy. I have read for years about how I shouldn't eat all that packaged stuff, it's not good for your health, fresh is so much better. But there was no tangible measure of wrongness. Now I have a measure - a crappiness index right there on the package.
In retrospect, I estimate that I was eating about double the recommended daily sodium intake. I did that because I could, and because I wasn't paying attention.
High blood pressure is called the silent killer because it generally has no symptoms (except in very acute cases). It just harms your body over the years, damaging your heart and other places, until you have something very serious, or you die.
Hypertension, and the associated downstream diseases, are a product of our times. When we were evolving into our current state (if you believe in that evolution stuff), salt was relatively scarce but necessary to our bodies, and so we humans naturally crave it.
In these so-called modern times, our industrial food economy has oceans of salt available, to make any food more apparently yummy or to cover up deficiencies in the product. To take care of ourselves, we have to go against a conspiracy between our human nature and the industrial food complex, defending
ourselves against alluring but harmful offerings.
In his book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond provides a great description of what happens when a formerly scarce food or additive, such as salt, suddenly becomes widely available. Behaviors that developed over thousands of years become harmful or even deadly.
[I looked for a pithy quote from the book to summarize the onslaught of abundant salt and its effects, but Diamond doesn't do pithy quotes. He is one of the world's great writers of Six-Pagers: books that are filled with amazing and fascinating detail on a topic, which you pick up at bed time and then decide after about six pages that it is time to go to sleep. But I love them and always make it to the end of each one, eventually.]
And now here's a measure of evil for you: Adding salt to processed food allows it to retain more water, increasing the weight of food that it sold by the pound and thus the vendor's revenue.
Excess salt is good for profits, even as it kills far more Americans than any terrorists have or ever will.
From the American Heart Association:
High blood pressure was listed as a primary or contributing cause of death in about 348,102 of the more than 2.4 million U.S. deaths in 2009.
[Of course, not all cases of hypertension are due to excess salt. It is one of several contributors to high BP.]
Food is just one part of the picture, although a big one. Activity and exercise are critical. And, easy to overlook but potentially as important, there is stress management. Finding ways to stop worrying, and to find peaceful moments each day.
Knowledge is good. Knowledge about your body is especially important.
Sometimes bad news can be good news. One piece of bad news, such as a high blood pressure reading, can help start a journey to better understand the total picture of what we eat, what we do, and how we can make better choice to meet the needs of our bodies for a healthy life.
Have you had your Blood Pressure taken recently?