Timing Your Meals for High Blood Pressure

New research presented at the European Society for Cardiology conference in Rome reveals that the timing of our meals is even more important than their ingredients.

You probably know that breakfast is important for good health. But there is a bad meal timing habit that you must ditch if you have high blood pressure.

The study was conducted by Turkish researchers on 721 adults with high blood pressure with an average age of 53.

In a relatively healthy person, blood pressure drops by 10 percent in the late evening and during the night when we settle down and our bodies wind down.

Researchers found that people who ate heavy meals after 7:00 PM were almost 3 times more likely to skip this beneficial nighttime drop.

Physicians call this condition non-dipper hypertension, and consider it a much greater risk for heart attack and stroke than other types of hypertension.

Obviously, if you eat too late at night, your body must work to digest the food. To do this, it secretes stress hormones that, in turn, elevate your blood pressure.

Together with meal times the researchers also considered meal ingredients, salt intake, and breakfast consumption, finding that late dinners had an even larger effect on high blood pressure than high salt intake.

In other words, to keep your blood pressure under control, it is more important to eat early dinners than to cut down on salt.

But to lower your blood pressure below 120/80 around the clock, you need to use the 3 easy blood pressure exercises found here…