Keith Alexander - Dash Diet For Beginners--Lower Your Blood Pressure For Healthy Weight Loss

DASH Diet

For Beginners

Lower Your Blood Pressure For Healthy Weight Loss

Keith Alexander

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Table of Contents

1: Understanding the DASH Diet

2: A Comprehensive Overview of the DASH Diet Plan

3: How the DASH Diet Affects Your Health

4: How Appropriate is the DASH Diet for You

5: How to Plan Your DASH Diet

6: Incorporating the DASH Diet into Your Lifestyle

7: DASH Diet Shopping and Food Guide

8: The DASH Diet 14-Day Menu Planner

9: DASH to Fitness Workout Plan

10: The DASH Diet Cookbook Recipes

I ntroduction

Blood pressure, the risk of heart diseases, diabetes, stroke, and weight loss are arguably some of the most discussed issues in the society today. The contribution of diet to all these problems is evident in as much as exercise and other interventions are commonly cited. You are what you eat and your body responds to the nutrients that you take in to your system.

DASH diet is an excellent choice for people who want to lose weight or eat healthy as a measure to safeguard their bodies against infections. DASH diets open up lots of possibilities without hard-to-follow rules, gimmicks or any unreasonable restrictions. As opposed to other diet plans which impose stringent measures and get you stuck in diet doldrums, DASH diet makes you full of energy and enhances your satisfaction.

DASH diet is nutritionally sound, endorsed and approved by the health community and based on extensive scientific experiments. It was chosen by the US News and World Report as a number one diet in the Best Diets for Healthy Eating, Best Diets Overall and Best Diabetes Diets categories. It is not a crash or fad diet but rather a medically developed plan that helps in improving your overall health.

The most interesting thing with DASH diet and certainly the reason behind its popularity is the manner in which it addresses health issues as a matter of priority. Scientific research including laboratory experiments has shown that this diet has a significant impact on cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and kidney functions. Being an excellent weight loss plan, DASH diet has been found to have a beneficial impact on metabolic syndrome, type II diabetes, heart diseases as well as other obesity-related complications.

This book contains everything you need to know to succeed in planning and executing your DASH diet plans. In it, you will find recipes, meal plans and a fitness program. Every plan included can be customized to meet your unique individual requirements.

1: Understanding the DASH Diet

As early as the 1970s, the problem of high blood pressure in the United States had already become rampant. This forced the National Institutes of Health in 1992 to provide funds for research activities aimed at finding a lasting dietary solution to hypertension. The ultimate goal was to come up with dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH).

The research was conducted by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute through the assistance of five medical research institutions in the United States. These institutions included Duke University Medical Center, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Johns Hopkins University, Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.

Working in collaboration with one another, these facilities undertook what is considered to be one of the most extensive and exhaustive researches to this day as far as nutrition solutions for hypertension are concerned.

Through randomized control trials, the teams of nutritionists, nurses, doctors, and statisticians worked tirelessly between their institutions. Each of the five facilities picked its own group of participants so as to ensure the findings were not biased. According to the research documentation, more than 8,000 people deliberately went through the screening process under the guidance of the researchers. According to the research requirements, two thirds of the sports were supposed to be filled by participants who were at a high risk of hypertension.

Three diets were used at each facility to test the effect they had on blood pressure. The first diet which was a control diet had a typical resemblance to the standard American diet. It was characterized by low levels of calcium, magnesium, potassium and fiber. The level of fat and protein was also modeled after the average American diet. The factor that was altered in this diet was the level of sodium which was made lower at 1500 mg compared to the average diet. The purpose of this alteration was to represent doctors recommendations to lower the level of sodium intake so as to subsequently lower blood pressure.

The second diet was similar in composition to the control diet but it had more vegetables and fruits as well as fewer snacks. Its fiber content was also higher than the control diet.

The third and last diet which was the DASH diet had lots of vegetables, fruits, lean protein and low fat dairy. Saturated fats and the overall fat intake were also at their lowest levels. The DASH diet was formulated based on research that revealed the positive impact certain minerals and fiber had on high blood pressure.

Participants in the second and third diets had a sodium intake of 3000 mg daily which represents the average intake of sodium by Americans. The main reason for holding the sodium intake at the normal level was to see whether nutritional changes had a positive impact on hypertension without the need to lower sodium intake.

For purposes of comparisons, two DASH trials were undertaken. The first trial ran from August 1993 all the way to July 1997. The second trial also known as the DASH sodium trial was conducted from September 1997 to November 1999. In the course of each of these trials, the groups were placed on control diet for 3 weeks during which their blood pressure, symptoms and urine were closely monitored. There was a clear difference between the first study and the second one.