Cardiovascular System
To understand how elevated blood pressure affects your overall health, it’s important to understand what makes your heart pump. Your cardiovascular system - your heart, arteries, veins capillaries, and the blood that fills them - nourishes your body and connects each part of the body to every other part.
The cardiovascular system carries the following three items through your body:
1. Food in the form of carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals and brought in through the gastrointestinal tract to every organ in the body.
2. Oxygen, which is brought in through the lungs and dissolved in the blood, to organs far from the lungs.
3. Waste, a normal product of your body’s metabolism that results from the many chemical reactions that are taking place in your body. For example, the cardiovascular system carries carbon dioxide to the lungs and the other waste products to the liver and kidneys.