High Blood Pressure, Diet can kill

High blood pressure and its end result , paralytic stroke or cerebral hemorrhage, is responsible for several thousand deaths every year.

Strokes are said to be the third largest killer, the first and second being heart ailments and cancer, respectively.

In Australia, there was a time one person in every ten people you pass in the street was doomed to a stroke that will paralyse part of his brain or kill him outright.

The tragic feature of high blood pressure is not that it kills people, but that often it reduces strong men and women to a condition resembling imbecility which sometimes persists for the rest of their lives.

Of course, not all strokes are as serious as that. Many high blood cases have minor strokes, which only have slight effects. They may not even lose consciousness.

Strokes are of three kinds. The first is cerebral hemorrhage, in which case a tiny artery in the brain bursts and causes a small lesion or tear in a part of the brain.

If this lesion or tear is of a minor nature, effects may be no more than a little difficulty in speech, memory or in walking for a day or two. If it is of a serious nature, death may follow.

The second type of stroke is called cerebral thrombosis. In this case, a blood clot in a small artery blocks the flow of blood to a part of the brain. The affected part not being supplied with blood, ceases to function.

In the third type, cerebral embolism, however, the cause is due to a sudden blockage of a brain artery by a floating particle of a dead tissue or other matter, which becomes jammed in a small artery and cuts off the supply of blood to a part of the brain.

The effects of this case can be more serious, often involving the sudden collapse of the victim.

When a really serious stroke occurs the results are tragic indeed. There is often prolonged unconsciousness, and sometimes the eyes, mouth and head are pulled to one side. One side of the body is usually paralyzed.

The arm is often rendered useless, being permanently bent into the side, the fingers turned into the palm.

The leg may also be affected, while speech is often reduced to a few scarcely articulated words.

The crowning humiliation is that the victim’s bowels and bladder will function involuntarily. They become a burden to themselves and their families.

The stertorous breathing greatly alarms relatives. Some 64 per cent of serious strokes are reckoned to be fatal. Even when the patient “recovers”, the recovery is often partial.

Any person who experiences minor stroke and recovers can take it as a warning of worse to follow, unless he immediately changes his regime of living and eating to the preventive, and corrective principles.

These principles, it should be noted, are the result of several years clinical experience by some of the most advanced medical and science research workers in the world.

Signs that stroke might be on the way can be detected from symptoms of high blood pressure.

These include, severe pounding headaches, poor memory, head noises, shortness of breath, insomnia, nervousness, dizziness and perhaps blood in the urine. There is strong evidence that certain foods are the primary cause of this silting process, and now attacking people in their forties, thirties or even earlier.

Foods suspected by nutritional science of silting up arteries with cholesterol deposits are the hydrogenated foods (edible fats and oils that have been treated with hydrogen such as margarines and cooking fats, vegetable shortenings and processed cheeses), as well as the saturated fatty foods and the sugary foods.

Wrong diet is enemy number one. People living under natural conditions, eating simple, natural foods, don’t have high blood pressure. Rural diet comprises sweet potatoes, taro, yam, banana, nuts, sugarcane etc.

Those on the coasts also eat a lot of fish.

These foods are whole, wholesome, natural and unprocessed.

All contain full quota of vitamins and minerals. High blood pressure is essentially a degenerative condition due to our “civilized” diet and our so-called civilized way of life.

The diet of the sufferer from high blood pressure consists, and has consisted for some years, of a mixture of foods which contain a great excess of protein, starch and sugar, in addition to an assortment of devitalized, demineralized foods, all of which may leave harmful deposits in the human body.

Being too much for the kidneys to eliminate in the urine, uric acid salts may be deposited on the arterial walls, thus reducing their elasticity and restricting the circulation of the blood.

A diet which includes too many animal fats often leave cholesterol on the inside walls of the blood vessels.

It is cholesterol, plus uric acid deposits, and minerals which silt up the arteries, bringing about the condition known as hardening of the arteries and the high blood pressure that results from it.

The orthodox school of thought attributes the condition of blood pressure to hereditary weaknesses, restless, energetic, worrying temperaments, the increasing tempo or pace of living.

A new school of thought backed by exhaustive research however regards the items on this list as of secondary importance.

Modern science regards hereditary weaknesses as an inescapable factor in the cause of any or every human ailment, but has abundant proof that where sound nutrition, based on today’s nutritional science, is applied, hereditary weaknesses may be corrected and offset.