https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kj7_TBq36LM
The DASH diet. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches
to Stop Hypertension. The DASH diet is an eating plan promoted by the U.S.-based National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute. Designed to help treat or prevent high blood pressure. The DASH diet was
first introduced at the meeting of the American Heart Association in 1996 and later published
in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. Welcome to The Habits Pharmacy where Habits become
Medicine.
I'm Dr Chan, your host. This is intended to be a short video to introduce the DASH diet and
to highlight some of its key features. My goal for this video is a simple one, and that is to raise
awareness about the DASH diet and use this as the first step to activate people to review and
reconsider their own eating habits to combat hypertension. The DASH diet is an eating plan with
a list of recommended foods and a list of foods to limit. Foods recommended by the DASH diet include
vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat dairy products, fish, poultry, beans,
nuts and seeds, vegetable oils. Foods that the DASH diet recommends to limit include red meats
and fatty cuts of meats, full dairy products, sugar-sweetened beverages, sweets and sodium
intake. The standard DASH diet recommends limiting sodium intake to 2 300 milligrams a
day, a lower sodium version of the DASH diet restricts sodium to 1 500 milligram a day. So
that's the first feature of the DASH diet, it is an eating plan with a list of recommended foods
and a list of foods to limit. The second feature of the DASH diet is that they suggest specific
daily and weekly servings of the foods on this recommended list, which varies based on calories
intakes.
You can get serving size recommendation information of the DASH diet from the National
Heart, Lung and Blood Institute website, for example, you can download a PDF document from
this site for a detailed eating plan with serving size recommendations based on your daily calories
intake needs or target. This is an example of the kind of eating plans you can download from
the site, it is quite detailed. I recommend you go download the eating plan and study it for yourself
and to learn more about the DASH diet. In the last 20 over years since it was first introduced,
the DASH diet has been extensively studied and many studies have consistently found the
DASH diet to be useful in helping to lower blood pressure. But the DASH diet is not perfect,
it has its fair share of criticism. For example, this list of foods that the DASH diet
recommends to choose more of or to limit, people who practice specific diets such as
ketogenic or low carbohydrate diets or vegan diets or plant-based diets would take issue with
some specific aspects of the recommendations here. As I have said earlier, my goal for this short
video is a simple one and that is to introduce the key features of the DASH diet.
I am not
able to go into a detailed review and discussion of all aspects of the DASH diet, including its
limitations and challenges. In this short video, for those who are interested and want to go a
little deeper, I found this interesting article from Harvard School of Public Health reviewing
the DASH diet, I suggest you go read that, it's a short but useful read. So these are the
key features of the DASH diet. The DASH diet whilst shown to be generally good for lowering
blood pressure, is not without its limitations, weaknesses and challenges. So if you have access,
I would strongly recommend that you work closely with your own doctor or dietitian to help you
to review your eating habits comprehensively, so as to help you make changes and improvements
to your diet holistically and specifically based on your needs and medical conditions, if
any.
If you have found this video useful, suggest that you also watch my other videos
related to this topic, you can click the links here, or in the notes below. Let Habits be Thy
Medicine. I’m Dr Chan. Eat Well and Be Well..
