Dash diet guidelines

The most important thing in dash diet is to reduce sodium to an upper limit of 2,400 milligrams or lowest limit of 1,500 milligrams per day. Almost every product contain salt, for example – 50g of cornflakes have 1,4g of salt, slice of bread – 0,75g and average dinner – about 10g of it. Our daily needs limit to 1,5g of salt. In opinion of World Health Organisation experts, we should not exceed the amount of 5 gramms of sodium daily. How to count how many salt is in products we use? On the major part of them the amount of sodium is written, not salt. In 5g of salt there is 2g of sodium. So if we want to know, how much really salt we eat, we should multiply the amount of sodium by 2,5 – but it only shows us how many salt is in 100g of this product.

To reduce consumption of salt, try to remember these tips:

• do not salt meals before tasting it,
• try to replace salt with herbs,
• avoid processed food – it contains a lot of salt, which is used as one of the preservatives
• if you cannot imagine your life without salt – buy the sodium-potassium one, it is less harmful,
• do not accustum your kids to eat salt – the scientist proved, that the meals taste good to the children even without salt, which stopps when adults accustom children to eat it.

As you may see, the beginnings could be tough, but the advantages of stabilizing blood pressure and losing weight are encouraging. Hypertension could be a dangerous disease – these days lots of people dying because of heart attacks, which are caused i.a. by arteriosclerosis (caused by hypertension) and stress. You can fight with hypertension not only by compliance with the dash diet menu, but also by changing your lifestyle – less stress, more phisical exercises, stop smoking and try not to abuse alcohol. You should also loose some weight if obesity is your problem (in this dash diet helps you a lot), reduce your daily amount of coffee, tea and also coke (all of them contain coffeine). If you are not a sport type, more like couch potato – you should try to stroll at least for thirty minutes a day. It is not a big effort, and the profits will surely appear maybe not immediately, but in a short period of time.

21.06.2010. 09:33