my wife wants to create a chart using blood pressure reading and salt content of food labels, problem she sees is that the salt readings are in the low 10 and blood pressure in the high tens, so that when she creates a chart the data is misleading (according to her) and she would like the data to reflect better the bloods/salts better to see if the relationship between the two is better, instead of low number for salt and higher number for blood reading, does that make sense?
Hi David,
Are you able to upload a sample Excel file so I can see what you mean. I'm not familiar with the blood pressure/salt relationship.
Cheers,
Mynda
i will post it later, when i have extracted it from her laptop
please find attached the excel file
my wife has created the chart from the data she has added, in same places she has no data for certain dates
as you can see the salt measurement is a low number, and the blood pressure reading is high number, but she would like to know if the two could be closer to reflect salt intake to blood pressure reading
David Barnes
Hi David,
I'm not sure that the data is misleading, the values are what they are. When your wife asks for the numbers to be 'closer together' what exactly does that mean? You're straying into manipulating the numbers to show you what you want.
If your wife is not seeing a relationship between the salt intake and blood pressure then that could be because:
- There isn't any, or
- There are other external factors
You can only plot the values you have measured.
If you want to push the salt values up into the range of the blood pressure readings then you can add a base value to all those salt numbers.
You could also multiply the salt values by a scaling factor but this will distort the measurements and I wouldn't recommend this.
Regards
Phil
Hello,
I agree with Phil, it is better not to distort the measurements.
The blood pressure reading is one thing and the salt intake is another. The less salt you eat per day the better it is for your blood pressure. As far as I am aware there is no measurement correlation between these two. There are many factors for having high blood pressure, salt is just one of them.
As per the American Heart Association the recommendation is to eat less than 2.300 milligrams (2.3 g) of sodium per day and in average normal table salt contains 40% sodium. By the numbers presented in the file it looks your wife is handling that part good.
Br,
Anders
I agree with Phil and Anders, but some other options are:
1. plot the data on a log scale (chart axis settings)
2. chart the salt intake in a separate chart to the blood pressure. This will illustrate the fluctuations in the salt intake more clearly. The salt chart can be positioned just below the blood pressure chart so comparisons can still be made.
Mynda
thanks for the replies - i will show her the answers to see if she is happy
Dave B
