Blood Pressure
Think of your circulatory system as the Grand Union Canal - a series of locks and gates that help move the blood around to where it is needed. Gravity works on your blood just as it works on the rest of your body, it wants to pull everything downwards. Gravity wants to take all that blood distributed through your body and pull it down to your feet, you want your blood to pump to your brain. On cue, arteries in the lower body constrict while the heart dramatically increases output. The instant result, blood pressure rises and blood flows to the brain. It is an ingenious system, but so fast to throw out of whack.
When you put on extra pounds around your middle, your heart pumps harder to force blood into all that new fatty tissue. When you nosh on crisps and other high sodium (ie. salty) foods, your body retains water in order to dilute the excess sodium (salt), increasing overall blood volume. When you line your arteries with plaque from too many fatty meals, pressure increases as the same amount of blood has to squeeze through newly narrowed vessels. When the pressures of the day haunt you at night, your brain pumps out stress hormones that keep your body in a perpetual state of "fight or flight" anxiety, also forcing your heart to pump harder.
High salt, high fat diets and an excess of stress all combine to create a dangerous situation. When the pressure remains high for years on end, thin-walled vessels in the brain can burst under extreme pressure, brain cells die as a result in what is known as a "hemorrhagic stroke", or hypertension can cause plaque build up in one of the brain arteries, eventually cutting off blood flow. Kidney damage or a heart attack can also follow from dangerous plaque accumulations.
Then there's plain old "wear & tear" that high blood pressure causes on your heart. Over time the extra work brought on by HBP causes the walls of the heart to stiffen and thicken, the heart becomes a less efficient pump, unable to push out as much blood as it takes in, blood backs up, the heart gives out.
