Sitting can cause high blood pressure
Breaking up sit-down sessions is a great idea. At the top of the list of benefits is the power of UP to bring blood pressure DOWN.
If you don’t get a good dose of physical activity most days, chances are you’re dealing with high blood pressure. That’s because sitting or reclining for many hours a day stifles your metabolism. That, in turn, lowers levels of certain metabolites, whose job is to dilate blood vessels in response to activity. Those lower levels cause blood vessels to constrict, making your pressure rise.
Luckily, even brief bouts of activity throughout the day can improve blood pressure. One study found that when people with diabetes interrupted sitting with 30 minutes of light-intensity walking or with three minutes of simple resistance exercises every half hour, blood pressure went down by 14 to 16 mmhg (systolic) and 8 to 10 mmhg (diastolic).
Bonus: Using a high-resistance inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST) device for five minutes daily for six weeks strengthens breathing muscles, stimulates production of blood-vessels-relaxing nitric acid and can drop your systolic number by around 9 mmhg, while it improves the ability for arteries to expand upon stimulation by 45 percent.
Don’t get (cardiac) arrested
When researchers looked at 19 years’ worth of data on 21,000 people ages 45 and older, more than half of whom lived in the Southeast, they discovered that folks who regularly ate a Southern-style diet had a 46 percent higher risk of sudden cardiac death than those who ate it infrequently. The Southern-style diet was defined as having added unhealthy fats, fried foods, eggs, organ meats (such as liver or giblets), processed meats (such as deli meats, bacon and hot dogs) and sugar-sweetened beverages. The average American downs 18 pounds of bacon and 39 gallons of soda a year!
So listen up! You may know that an unhealthy menu can clog your arteries and increase your heart attack and stroke risk, but you may not have known it could lead to sudden cardiac arrest, which is caused when the heart’s electrical system malfunctions, reducing blood flow to the body and brain. So, here’s one more reason to adopt a Mediterranean diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, whole grains and legumes and with little meat and dairy. The researchers found those food choices slashed the risk of SCD by 26 percent.