You can get potassium salt for your softener--- it's more expensive. Salt affects blood pressure in maybe 5% of otherwise healthy people. But, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension from other factors, and other obesity related problems are so prevalent that about half of Americans over 50 are salt sensitive.
Exercise. The key to everything is exercise. HARD exercise. If you do very little physical exercise, your body produces chemicals that cause inflammation--- in your blood vessels, in your heart, in your lungs, everywhere. Those same chemicals signal your body to degenerate and die. It's programmed into your DNA. Back when everyone lived in tribes, the tribal group survival depended on the best use of food by the members most likely to survive. When members of the tribe got too old to run down food, or to dig it up or gather it, they did just like older animals in other groups: herds, prides, packs, etc. They stopped eating, crawled off by themselves, and died. The death signal is inactivity. For homo sapiens this happens sometime after age 50 or so. Even though there is no shortage of food these days, your body KNOWS it's not being used--- it's built into all of us, like a self destruct program.
The good news is if you exercise enough, your body produces other chemicals that get rid of the self destruct chemicals. BUT, you have to exercise like a young person--- you have to do enough physical exercise to break a full body sweat every single day. Those inflammation chemicals have to be cleared every 24 hours. Every day you don't is a day you're telling your body to prepare for death. The rules are that simple. Sit around and die, or get off your butt and live a while longer. From age 50 on, your number one priority has to be to keep yourself healthy. You aren't as strong as you used to be, and you can't recover like you used to. Prevention is the goal, and exercise is how you get there.
