Newsletter #168: Best Foods to Improve Blood Pressure 🫀
Good morning once again, humanOS friends!
This week, we looked at some studies examining how adding specific foods to the diet may help lower blood pressure, a subject we visited on the blog a few years ago. High blood pressure is, unfortunately, all too common. About 70 million adults in the US have high blood pressure – one out of every three! To make things worse, research suggests that a ton of people with hypertension aren’t even aware of it.
However, there is good reason to believe that high blood pressure is strongly connected to lifestyle factors - meaning of course that it is modifiable. For example, studies of people in hunter-gatherer communities find that their blood pressure is relatively low, and it seems to stay like that even as they get older. Could some simple dietary changes help keep your blood pressure in a healthy range?
To learn more, scroll on down 👇🏼
This Week’s Research Highlights
🫐 Compounds in blueberries may improve vascular health.
Researchers randomly assigned healthy participants to consume either a wild blueberry drink (11 g of wild blueberry powder, twice daily) or a matched control drink (also 11 grams of powder twice daily) for one month. The blueberry consumers experienced a reduction in 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure as well as an increase in flow-mediated dilation, a validated method of assessing blood vessel health by measuring how much an artery is able to widen when blood flow increases in that artery. To ascertain what exactly was responsible for these effects, the researchers also compared the effects of 160 mg of pure anthocyanins (blue pigments found in blueberries) to a dose of blueberries containing ~150 mg of anthocyanins, and found similar improvements in vascular function - suggesting that anthocyanins specifically are likely major contributors to the vascular benefits associated with blueberries.
🥣 Oat bran modulates the gut microbiota and lowers blood blood pressure.
Fifty participants with essential hypertension were randomly assigned to either control or to consume oat bran (30 grams per day, containing almost nine grams of dietary fiber). After the oat bran intervention, subjects showed significantly lower blood pressure compared to controls, and their use of antihypertensive drugs was also significantly reduced. These improvements were accompanied by alterations in the composition of the microbiota. Specifically, the consumers of oat bran showed increased relative abundance of Bifidobacterium, a class of beneficial gut bugs that help break down fiber, and in doing so generate short-chain fatty acids. SCFAs do all kinds of good stuff, including helping with blood pressure regulation.
🍙 A very small amount of seaweed in the diet improves components of metabolic syndrome, most notably blood pressure.
Researchers recruited 27 participants with at least one component of metabolic syndrome, and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. Group 1 consumed placebo for one month, followed by 4 grams of wakame seaweed per day for another month. Group 2 spent one month eating 4 grams of wakame per day, then one month of 6 grams of the seaweed daily. After participants ate 6 grams per day of seaweed per month, systolic blood pressure dropped by an average of 10.5 mmHg, primarily in those who had high-normal baseline blood pressure. As an added bonus, female participants also showed decreases in waist circumference (2.1 cm after 4 g/d of seaweed, and an additional 1.8 cm decrease after the 6 g/d regimen). 4-6 grams of seaweed is a tiny dose - you could easily consume that much in miso soup or add it to a salad. Also an excellent source of iodine!
Random Trivia Question of the Week
🤔When woodpeckers are foraging for bugs, their heads strike with around 1,000 times the force of gravity (1,000 g). This would kill a human, but the birds seem to endure it just fine. What anatomical feature (among others) helps soften the blow?
💡 ANSWER
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Sarah Everts: Sweating is our biological superpower. Via Science Friday.
- Helen Pearson & Benjamin Thompson: How COVID broke the evidence pipeline. Via Nature Podcast.
Products We Are Enjoying
Oat bran
Oats in general are healthy, don’t get me wrong, but oat bran is just better than traditional rolled oats...in basically every way. It contains more protein, more essential vitamins and minerals, more antioxidants, fewer calories, and more fiber, particularly beta-glucan which is linked to cardiovascular and immune health. It also cooks faster (good if you are lazy and impatient like me), and I personally prefer the taste and texture. Highly recommended as a versatile functional food.
humanOS Catalog Feature of the Week
See y'all next week!