I’ve never really thought about my blood pressure - I’ve had it checked fairly regularly, but I’ve never previously taken much notice of what the numbers were or anything. Recently though a friend of mine was diagnosed with pretty high blood pressure, which he wasn’t expecting at all, and has had to make a few changes to try to reduce it. So that got me thinking, and since I had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up this week anyway, I thought I’d pay a bit more attention this time.
For those like me who didn’t have any particular idea about this before, blood pressure is technically called ‘vascular pressure’ and is measured via two separate metrics - the maximum (systolic) and minimum (diastolic) pressure in the arteries. Those numbers that they call out in medical dramas (like ‘ninety over fifty and falling!!!’) refer to those two pressure measurements, which are expressed in terms of millimetres of Mercury (mmHg). Apparently the normal, healthy measurements for someone my age is 120/80, ie a maximum pressure of 120mmHg when the heart is at the start of it’s major pump, falling to 80mmHg when it’s resting in between.
So I specifically asked my doctor what the measurement was this time, since he tends to just nod sagely rather than telling me the details. As it turns out, my blood pressure is ‘very healthy indeed’ in my doctors own words, clocking in at 100/65. That sounded pretty low but apparently ‘too low’ is under 90/50 - 120/80 is average but allegedly you should aim a little lower than that ideally, so 100/65 is doing rather well.
That was good news, although now I’m left kinda wondering why, since I don’t feel I’ve really done anything consciously to keep it healthy; I certainly don’t do a lot of exercise anymore compared to years gone by. But I guess I do eat pretty healthily most of the time - I’m not a health nut by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like good food so most of our meals are prepared with fresh ingredients and we favour rice / pasta dishes over heavy or fried foods; that by nature means we tend to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, use olive & peanut oil more than fats, and probably take in a lot less salt than if we ate convenience foods most of the time. I’ll occasionally eat crisps and other junk of course but it’s not that often, probably just once a week. I also don’t drink very much which probably helps - a couple of glasses of wine a week is all I tend to manage these days, barring any social events, and even then my ‘maturing’ metabolism doesn’t seem to be able to handle Guinness like it used to so I mostly stay away from that now. Mostly. 
You don’t tend to think about your health very much when you’re in your 20s, but it’s funny how things sneak up on you (like my back injury, and my friends high blood pressure). I guess we could all do to pay a bit more attention to how we treat ourselves sometimes.
January 27th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I’ve always heard that a good balance between low/high pressures is that low = high / 2 + 1. Here we use the 1:10 scale for pressure (12 instead of 120) informally, so now that would make more sense. Ideally we consider 12/7 to be the best vascular pressure, and surprisingly I have such values! I say surprisingly because I tend to take much coffee and salt (which raise the vp), sleep less than recommended (which lowers the vp), and have lots of dizzyness and problems when standing up too fast or bending down.
All in all, your food habits sound great, so keep them for long
January 27th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
@Sinbad Live style (sleep, exercise and dietary patterns) is only part of what influence blood pressure. Your genes is very probably the most important factor. You have perhaps the luck that you could eat all the junk food, make zero exercise, etc and you pressure would not go up… Like the people that can smoke all their lives and never have any problems related to cigarette. Whereas unlucky one smoke one cigarette and catch a lung cancer.
Btw a single measure is better than nothing but to be sure you should measure the blood pressure a whole day. The blood pressure doesn’t stay stable during the day: eating can increase it, work can, etc.
The pressure should be measured even in the night because some people have their blood pressure that rise dramatically during sleep !
Its not that I think you have it its just to demonstrate that its not simple
Also salt is not really a factor of high pressure it is the inverse.
If your kidneys (to be concise) work well you will simply evacuate the excessive salt. On the other hand some people have their salt regulation mixed up and retain to much salt hence the pressure grows. For those ones decreasing salt intake is very important. For healthy people decreasing salt will not make any difference it could even lead to the problem that you don’t have enough salt…
The main idea behind eating low salt is that eating regularly lots of salt will destroy the salt regulation but I am not sure there is good evidence for this theory. It is more the fact that lots of patients with high pressure must decrease salt that every one now thinks that it is good to eat low salt!
@Kencho What do you mean by dizzyness: equilibrium problems or do you “see small stars” ?
The former is more a problem in the internal ear. The latter is caused by the oxygen starvation itself caused by low pressure. IMO the dizzyness when you stand up is more a symptom of low pressure: not enough blood reaches the brain
January 28th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Just as comparison, mine was 145/104… As you can see, a tad high!
Re salt (following lazalong’s comments) - salt can be a huge factore is you are salt intolerant, which (if my memory is correct) is around 25% of us. Some people can eat pretty much as much as they want - for those 25% this isn’t true.
I’ve got my next appointment on wednesday - so I’ll see then if my new diet has improved matters.
January 28th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Congrats on the good health Steve! Cut out some junk here, eat a bit more healthy there, and Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got clean arteries! I’m exaggerating of course, since excercise and genetics are factors as well.
For instnace, my family has a history of high cholesterol, so I have to watch out for that now. But on the positive side we also have a history of keeping our hair color and not turning gray before 40. I’m 38 now and I still can’t find a gray hair on my head.
January 28th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
@Dan: haha, that’s where I lose out, I have loads of grey already and am likely to be totally white by 45…
January 29th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
@Steve: Then you should start considering a name change to “Steve Martin”, hahaha. Now seriously, I’d like to have grey/white hair; just like how it looks