Blood pressure is no easy issue to tackle, and medicine has been looking for a definite solution for the problem for a long time now. And while we don’t seem to have a “miracle cure” in sight yet, there does seem to be some promise in certain natural treatments, in particular fruits like blueberries. Recently, research has been pointing towards blueberries being a potentially very good treatment for blood pressure problems.
According to a study, women who were eating blueberries – either frozen or dried – for a full month, ended up reporting lower blood pressure levels, while at the same time their blood was found to have increased levels of a certain substance that’s known for relaxing the walls of blood vessels. That could explain the positive influence of blueberries, although it’s probably just part of the full picture.
According to Sarah Johnson, researcher at the Florida State University who was in charge of the study, blueberries are showing a lot of promise for reducing perpetually high blood pressure levels, and they should definitely be present in the diet of people who suffer from the condition.
On the other hand, it should also be kept in mind that the blueberry is not a magic cure, and should not be seen as a complete replacement for a regular, healthy lifestyle. It’s important that patients keep their bodies in check, including using more serious medication for hypertension whenever appropriate and prescribed by a physician. At the same time, adding blueberries to an already balanced diet should improve the patient’s results significantly over a relatively short period of time, the study seems to indicate.
This is apparently not the first time that blueberries have been pointed out as potentially very useful for dealing with high blood pressure; they are known to contain various compounds that boost the body’s levels of nitric oxide, a substance that positively affects the cells along the inner walls of blood vessels.
The study had a sample size of 48 women with an average age of 55, all with high blood pressure. The women were split into a main and control group, with the control group eating a substance that closely resembled the blueberries given to the main group, but actually not containing any blueberries.
In the end, it took about eight weeks for the women who had been consuming blueberry powder to start showing a noticeable change in their blood pressure levels, with a drop of about 5%-6% in every person. On the other hand, the control group eating the “placebo” powder didn’t show any noticeable improvements at all, leading researchers to believe that blueberries were indeed the main factor at play in the situation.