8 Small Things You Can Do Today to Live Healthier
Recent science shows that small lifestyle changes (and a little fun) are all it takes to improve your health. We talked to prominent doctors, crunched the data, and found a few high-payoff tweaks.
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Beet It
Drinking a cup of nitrate-rich beetroot juice each day significantly lowered blood pressure in people with hypertension, according to a new report. Over the course of four weeks, subjects' systolic blood pressure (the top number, which measures the pressure in arteries as the heart beats) dropped by about 8 points, while diastolic BP (the bottom number, which measures pressure between beats) decreased 2 to 5 points. Why? The body converts nitrate to nitric oxide, which relaxes arteries and improves blood flow.
From the
May 2015 issue of
O, The Oprah Magazine
