Food is essential to the sustenance of life, without it we would simply die. Even if one's dietary intake does not contain near optimum amounts of water, protein, carbohydrates, minerals or fats, the body can tick along for several years seemingly not phased by nutritional anomalies.



This is because the body is so good at making internal compensating adjustments to counteract any dietary injustice we impose on our body. Eventually how ever, as good as the body is at encapsulating its work, tell tail sighs that all is not well with one's diet are sure to surface.

For example one may become over weight, there may be a deterioration of skin, nails and hair condition, aching joints, constipation, breathlessness, and most significantly there may be high blood pressure.

An essential aim of our diet should be to correctly balanced intakes of potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium minerals. These are called macros minerals because they are required in relatively large amounts by the body, (in hundreds of milligrams or gram unit quantities). There are other required minerals such as phosphorous, zinc, copper, etc. but they are required in much less quantities.

The diet of industrialised nations such as America has become sodium and animal fat rich in the last century, compared to rural and feudal eras before.

Sodium is the base metal mineral in salt, which is substantially used as a means to extend the shelf life of processed foods by food manufacturers. In addition, the very system of food processing destroys essential natural occurring nutrients and enzymes, replacing them with artificial substances, which have little or no useful nutritional properties in the finished foodstuff. In fact their properties are often detrimental to us.

This is such a feature of American diet now that average American consumes about 10g of salt daily which translates to 4g or 4000 mg of sodium daily. It is by far the most abundant metal mineral in the modern food intake.

Essential, the body naturally yearns for potassium to be the principal metal in the dietary minerals, followed by magnesium and calcium. Sodium is the least required. Nature emphasises this in two main ways.

Firstly, potassium occurs in fruits and vegetables far more abundantly than any other mineral. Sodium is usually present in trace amounts or in amounts that lags magnesium and calcium contents by a significant margin.

Secondly, because natural food is so scarce in sodium and potassium rich, the body evolved in such a way to function with very little sodium, but with potassium, magnesium and calcium instead. Over thousands of years of evolution the kidneys have learned to retain and recycle the relatively meagre supply of sodium for metabolism.

So how does this translate into advisable food intake?

Well, for someone suffering with high blood pressure, the first natural line of defence against hypertension has to be the implementing of a quality diet that redresses the industrialised mineral imbalances mentioned above.

If one is not already on a high potassium - high fibre - low sodium - low fat diet, then perhaps a DASH type diet is a good place to start.

In terms of macro minerals, potassium has to be the lead mineral, followed by magnesium and calcium. This is largely achieved by making fresh fruit and vegetables a much larger part of one's diet.

Potassium content must be at least 5 times the amount of sodium intake. (Indeed a ratio of 10 times or more is not unusual).

The total sodium content must not exceed 500mg per day, this amounts to less than 1g (or half a teaspoon) of total salt per day.

Magnesium and calcium intakes should be 500 - 1000 mg per day.

If high blood pressure is not reduced even after a few months of this diet regime then one could increase the magnesium intake either by eating more nuts and seeds or by taking magnesium food supplements.

Essentially, all this means meticulously analysing one's food intake for these minerals everyday until a feel for the figures and quantities are developed. This may take a month or two, but the development of one's nutritional awareness applied to one's food intake is a key ingredient organically reducing high blood pressure problems.

A downloadable database of nutritional content in common foods from www.kelpiesoft.com for free.

I personally weighed everything (in grams) I ate, got the 'per 100gram' mineral content from this database and recorded it all on an excel spreadsheet, which calculated a daily total for each mineral. With such statistics at hand one can easily visualise, make dietary ajustments and chart one's progress.