Journal of Food Processing & Technology

The importance of comprehensive nutrition knowledge and new dietary components to target high blood pressure as a major public health issue

5^th Euro-Global Summit and Expo on Food & Beverages

June 16-18, 2015 Alicante, Spain

Saman Khalesi, Jing Sun and Siddharth Sharma

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Food Process Technol

Abstract:

High blood pressure is strongly associated with major chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease and kidney dysfunction. It is one of the most common conditions in the world affecting more than one third of all adults worldwide. Poor dietary habit is strongly and positively associated with high blood pressure. Inadequate level of nutrition knowledge and inability to make healthy food choices can be associated with poor dietary habits and higher blood pressure. Individuals usually require having an adequate level of nutrition knowledge to be able to follow dietary approaches to improve blood pressure. Therefore it has been suggested that nutritionist and dieticians should educate individuals with high blood pressure about their diet and healthy food choices. However, our latest study suggests that individuals with high blood pressure have insufficient knowledge regarding food choices in relation to the blood pressure control and management. The results also show that salt intake among these people is still high (almost twice the recommended intake of salt to prevent cardiovascular disease). In addition, new compelling evidence suggests adding functional food and dietary components (such as probiotics, green tea, and flaxseed) to daily diet have moderating effect on blood pressure control. However, poor education and lack of public knowledge has limited the consumption of these dietary components. An effort can be made to increase public knowledge of food and dietary components which can improve blood pressure and overall health. These efforts may lead to improvement in food choices and reduction in the burden of diet-related disease.