You can't spend quality time with your family or advance your career, or enjoy anything else in life if you're laid up in a hospital be or worse.

What is high blood pressure you may ask? High blood pressure is simply the amount of force the blood puts on your arteries as it passes through them.

Your blood pressure doesn't stay steady throughout the day - it rises and falls. When your blood pressure stays elevated over time, you are said to have high blood pressure.

Here's the disturbing part. Although some people may get headaches, dizziness, or blurred vision, high blood pressure often has NO signs or symptoms. That's why it's also known as The Silent Killer. The surefire way to find out is to get tested by your doctor.

There is a lot of attention in the media about the obesity problem, quite a lot about diabetes but not so much about blood pressure. In comparison blood pressure is just a serious.

The fact is that nearly one billion ? yes, I said 1 billion - people worldwide have high blood pressure! A recent study predicted that this number will increase to 1.56 billion people by 2025. Those are staggering numbers, to say the least if not scary.

That's puts up there with obesity. The problem is that you see your fat and with high blood pressure you cannot see it.

Left untreated, high blood pressure will increase the risk of kidney damage, eye damage, hardening of the arteries atherosclerosis or arteriosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases. The cause of 3 out of 5 cases of heart failure in women is high blood pressure.

There are a lot of factors that that contribute to high blood pressure including but not limited to smoking, lack of physical activity, obesity, high sodium intake, high cholesterol, excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages and of course, heredity.

Diabetes patients are also at greater risk for developing high blood pressure and other cardiovascular diseases. Also, African-Americans seem to be at a greater risk of developing high blood pressure at an early age.

Your family history plays a role, but there are many things you can do to prevent or reduce high blood pressure even if you have genes that might make you more likely to have it.

Being extremely overweight or obese and having high blood pressure are so closely related that it has even been given its own name: obesity hypertension. Of all the cases of hypertension in the U.S., 75% can be directly attributed to obesity.

Deaths directly from hypertension or that had high blood pressure as a primary contributor totaled 310,707 in the U.S. in 2002. It's a chain reaction: obesity=hypertension= heart disease=death and that all begins with how fat a person is.

For every 2.2 pounds of weight lost, blood pressure falls 1 mm/hg. Of course, this is just one very positive byproduct of weight loss.

When most people talk about reducing high blood pressure, the very first thing that pops into their mind is sodium intake. It's also interesting to note that eating unprocessed fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish provides all the sodium your body needs about 500 mg a day.

The very first thing is to begin by evaluating their daily regimen and immediately start planning some permanent lifestyle changes. Planning is the key to achieving those healthy numbers. It's important to slowly incorporate your changes so you stick with them. Focus only on one change at a time. Eventually, each small change will add up to bigger results. Find out more it is life saving.

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