2.3. Educational Intervention Group
hypertension
HYPERTENSION
A registered dietitian oversaw the educational intervention and provided participants in the intervention group with detailed guidance and recommendations on adhering to a low-sodium diet. During their initial consultation, the participants received a dietary plan that emphasized the consumption of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and low-fat and minimally processed food. Additionally, their daily energy intake was reduced by 500 to 1000 kcal based on their baseline weight. To ensure continued adherence to the low-sodium diet, the participants attended monthly 60-min face-to-face sessions with the registered dietitians who provided encouragement and motivation.The DSRQ [The activities were developed according to the instrumental subscales: (i) attitude and subjective norm, participants received explanations to understand the low-sodium dietary importance to control hypertension and the influence of family and others in choices and food preparation; (ii) perceived behavioral control, they identified barriers to low sodium adherence, such as lack of knowledge, interference with socialization, and lack of food selections; they learned to increase information about food choices, cooking or preparing food without sodium, low-sodium diet shopping, evaluating recipes and making suggestions for changes to low-sodium food, and to read labels; (iii) dependent behavior, they received learning sessions on the amount of sodium in food, including sodium quantity demonstrations, low-sodium food selection, changes in food choices in restaurants, and being aware of the need to change both taste and food preferences.The educational intervention was individualized and based on dietary information provided by the patient. They answered the 24-h dietary recall for monitoring low-sodium diet adherence. The 24-h dietary recall was analyzed by computer software, the DietSys [