Myrtle Ritvo

Although high blood pressure after eating is not typical, it can be caused by consuming certain food and drink.

This article discusses symptoms, potential causes, diagnosis, and treatment of high blood pressure after eating.

In most cases, high blood pressure does not have any symptoms. Despite popular belief, high blood pressure does not cause headaches or nosebleeds unless blood pressure is so high that it is a medical emergency.

The only way to know if you have high blood pressure is by having it measured by a healthcare provider or at home using a blood pressure monitoring device.

Certain foods and drinks can cause blood pressure to rise after consuming them. They include:

Smoking also causes an immediate rise in blood pressure. If you have a cigarette after meals, the increase in blood pressure could be from smoking rather than eating.

If your blood pressure is high after eating, you should limit foods or drinks known to raise blood pressure. Limiting sodium intake if you already have high blood pressure or prehypertension (elevated blood pressure that isn't yet high enough to be hypertension) is important, as too much sodium can further increase blood pressure.

It’s recommended that adults consume less than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. If you have hypertension, healthcare providers recommend an even lower sodium intake, somewhere around 1,500 milligrams per day. Most people’s sodium intake comes from processed foods and food from restaurants.

Foods that are typically high in sodium include:

If your blood pressure continues to be high after eating despite eliminating foods and drinks that typically raise blood pressure, you should contact a healthcare provider.

If high blood pressure is left uncontrolled, it can lead to complications, including:

Because high blood pressure doesn’t have symptoms, the only way to know if you have it is by having your blood pressure measured using a blood pressure cuff. This can be done by a healthcare provider or by using an at-home device for blood pressure monitoring.

Your healthcare provider can discuss ways to manage your blood pressure, including lifestyle changes, keeping a healthy weight, and, in some cases, medications.

It is important that you do not attempt to diagnose yourself with high blood pressure. Contact a healthcare provider if:

If your blood pressure is 180/120 mm Hg or higher and you have any of the following symptoms, call 911, as these are signs of a hypertensive crisis:

Call 911 or your healthcare provider immediately if you are pregnant and have a systolic (upper number) blood pressure reading of 160 mm Hg or higher or a diastolic (lower number) reading of 110 mm Hg or higher. This could be a sign of preeclampsia.

If you have high blood pressure after eating, it’s important to evaluate whether your diet consists of foods or drinks that cause blood pressure to go up after consuming them. Try eliminating or cutting back on these foods and beverages to see if your blood pressure improves. Contact your healthcare provider if your blood pressure continues to be high despite making these changes.

Uncontrolled high blood pressure can lead to major complications, including heart attack and stroke. Poor diet is a major contributor to high blood pressure. If your blood pressure is high after eating, it could be from certain foods and drinks.

The balance beam involves similar concepts. All the athlete has to do is keep her center of mass over the 4-inch-wide (10 centimeters) beam in order to balance. In other words, she could just stand there and not fall off, but it would be a rather uninteresting physics problem (and sport). Instead, gymnasts spin, twist and kick on the balance beam, testing the boundaries of the simple physics principle that could easily keep them stable.

Gerton said that the rings should also be counted as an event that's among the most advanced confrontations with physics that an athlete can face. The physics challenge that he notices specifically in this event is the lack of leverage that occurs when a gymnast pulls his body into a cross shape. It's one thing for a person to pull his body up to and through rings with arms that are near the body, but elite male gymnasts do this with their arms completely straight. The farther away from the body a gymnast holds his arms, the less leverage he has to move his body upward, Gerton said.

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" need to have an incredible amount of core strength to counteract that reduction in the leverage," he added.

In reality, there is no gymnastic event that is without extreme physics, experts say. Many of the events involve complicated balancing, such as handstands on the bars, and these maneuvers require the same coordination between center of mass and base of support as do the balance beam and pommel horse, but not as continually. Vault presents its own unique physics problem in the conversion of horizontal energy (running) into the vertical push and velocity required for the aerial skills gymnasts perform off the vault.

"You'll notice that people like Simone Biles do that really efficiently," Gerton said. "She takes her horizontal speed and she is able to convert that into vertical motion, which gives her a lot of time to do amazing things in the air."

However, vaulting doesn't require the same level of balance as do some of the other apparatuses.

Tumbling is notable because, when viewed through the lens of physics, it's somewhat the opposite of pommel horse and balance beam: There are fewer constraints on the gymnasts' movements but the physics involved are harder to understand. Gymnasts in this event aren't fighting to balance on a small surface, but the complex physics of a floor routine is sometimes beyond comprehension.

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"Tumbling on floor, from a physics perspective, is really, really complicated to deal with if you were to do an analysis of tumbling," Contakos said. In the world of biomechanics, motion analysis on tumbling is still at a really "primitive stage," he said.

Floor exercises are hard to analyze, because they have more variables than the other events, according to Contakos. For example, the floor is spring-loaded and the gymnasts are moving their bodies in more diverse ways that blend jumping, balancing, twisting and turning.

Olympic gymnasts in every event are performing at the limits of what is physically possible and showing laymen and scientists alike that they can do more than anyone realized.

"As soon as we think we've hit a wall on that ability of just one simple principle, someone comes along and does it bigger and better and faster, or makes up a new skill," Contakos said.

And this year's gymnasts at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are no exception.

"These amazing Olympic athletes are pushing the limits all the time," Gerton said. "They're figuring out how to push the physics to the edge as well."

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