Better Health Centre |+| Child Obesity and High Blood Pressure

Child Obesity and High Blood Pressure…they go together like peas in a pod!

Are your kids overweight?

Find out how this could dramatically shorten their lifespan!

Not only have studies shown that high blood pressure is on the rise, but these same studies show it no longer only affects older people, but younger and middle age adults are being affected as well.

The rise in the amount of children developing high blood pressure is in part to be attributed to more children suffering with weight problems, which is also a growing medical problem.

Obesity causes high blood pressure because fatty tissue, like all other body tissue, requires blood supply or else the tissue will die.  Luckily, as human beings, our hearts are very adaptable, and can endure so much.  But even so, when a child is over-weight, his heart is working considerably harder than the average weight child.

The best thing a child who suffers from obesity can do in order to lessen his risk of hypertension is to watch his diet and lose weight. Once so much of the excess fat is lost, the workload of the heart becomes easier, thus the blood pressure tends to drop.

A few aspects of our modern day living can be held in part responsible for increased obesity and hypertension in children. In this day and age, our diets are generally made up of foods higher in fat and sugar content than of years before. Many nutritionists and other health professionals have attributed convenience and processed foods as the main culprits of the rise in obesity and hypertension in younger people.

In the late 1990's, a study was conducted and published by the American Archives of International Medicine pertaining to dietary methods of controlling the rise in cases of hypertension, called "DASH". 

This study was supported by the Lung and Blood Institute, and set out to test the effects of eating patterns on blood pressure.

Four hundred and fifty people were observed in this study, some of them having been diagnosed with hypertension while others had normal blood pressure. 

These groups of people were required to eat only food provided by "DASH" for this eleven week study, in place of their normal everyday diets.  They also kept daily food logs, and ate their main meals of the day at one of the four participating clinics.

The conclusion of this study proved that a diet consisting of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as low-fat dairy food products, and food low in saturated fat significantly improved their blood pressure rates.