High blood pressure is the body’s scream for help — here’s what to do.
Ketsuda Phoutinane Spare Time Content Editor
12:24, 07 Mar 2026
Dr Sanjay Gupta is a leading cardiologist from America(Image: ABC via Getty Images)
High blood pressure is one of the most common health issues in the world. It can lead to heart attack, stroke and other serious health problems, but worryingly, most people show no symptoms.
Your heart must work harder if you have high blood pressure. Because the force of blood strains the walls of your arteries, the heart must compensate and pump harder to circulate blood around the body.
But like so many things, common sense healthy habits like a good diet, exercise and not smoking can help treat and prevent the problem — all well and good, but rather unspecific. Fortunately, one cardiologist has explained what can be done to keep your blood pressure in a healthy range.
Dr Sanjay Gupta, a leading American cardiologist, recently sat down with the ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast to discuss the everyday changes that cut to the heart of the problem. As Dr Gupta put it, high blood pressure is your body’s “scream for help”.
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How to prevent and treat high blood pressure with diet
The cardiologist named sleep, stress, activity, and diet as the four pillars of health. Naturally, improving these areas of life won’t just be good for your blood pressure, they’ll help just about anything health-related.
Of course, stress is hard to quantify and impossible to eliminate completely. It’s simpler to be mindful about what you eat, he explained.
“Food is something that people can make a change to. I think exercise, cardiovascular exercise is important, but people are becoming more conscious of exercise, and they are doing more. But all those things you cannot do lots of exercise and then be really proud that you can get away with four hours of sleep every night. You have to do it all.”
There’s a roundabout way to lower your blood pressure — eating fewer ultra processed foods(Image: Getty)
Dr Gupta shared some simple but important diet advice when asked about the recommendations he’d make to a patient with high blood pressure.
“I personally think sugar is the enemy. Because sugar causes a bunch of insulin spikes, whereas a lot of blood pressure is about cut down salt. Yeah, cut down salt.”
Dr Gupta recommended a roundabout way to reduce your intake that isn’t simply “eat less salt”. One roundabout solution is reducing how much ultra processed food you eat.
He said: “Reducing salt is good, but actually the salt isn’t where I guess I would think it is, which is adding lots of salt at the table. This is mainly in heavily processed food, so it’s sort of hiding in a lot of these meals and sort of ready meals and things like that. So actually, if you can cut back on that, I can still add, you know, salt to the eggs that I make at home without feeling so bad.”