Bringing blood pressure under control with berries

Which would you rather have? A handful of pills, or a bowlful of berries?

Silly question, right?

But why is it that the mainstream always assumes you'll take that handful of pills, no questions asked, at the first sign of trouble? How much longer can they ignore the power of fresh food and good nutrition?

If news like this keeps coming down the pike (and I suspect it will), then they won't be able to ignore it much longer -- though I'm sure they'll try.

Blueberries have been the subject of more than a few e-Tips. In recent years, we've learned they could, among plenty of other things, protect your bones and fight breast cancer.

This time, it's your heart health that could get a boost from the sweet little berries.

A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reveals that supplementing your diet with wild blueberries could very well bring blood pressure down.

What makes this study unique is that the researchers weren't looking to isolate some compound within the wild blueberry and test that -- they were looking at the whole food and how it can benefit heart health.

They found that spontaneously hypertensive rats given a diet supplemented with 8 percent wild blueberries (granted, that's a lot of blueberries!) showed less blood-vessel constriction than rats fed a control diet without the blueberries.

Over the course of an eight-week study, they discovered that blueberries seemed to improve vascular tone.

So, with all of these stories about how good blueberries are for us, have you stocked up your fridge? One of my favorite ways to eat blueberries is atop a heaping spinach salad -- in fact, maybe that's what I'll make for lunch today!

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About the author

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Christine O'Brien writes the e-letter Health eTips for Dr. Wright's Nutrition and Healing.

You can sign up for the free eTips at www.wrightnewsletter.com.


Comments

Anonymous's picture
1

Dave

Hello. I love blueberries and have high blood pressure. I can' get them except frozen or in cans most of the year here in central Pennsylvania. I believe frozen is the better choice, but am I still missing some/all the value they give if I can't get them fresh...or can't amanage to pay the price of getting the fresh berry shipped from around the world to our local store?

Dave

P.S. Thanks for the articles..we use the information and any recipes all the time.

Anonymous's picture
2

Anonymous

Blueberries, raspberries -- and don't forget cranberries. Hawthorn berries might be the best heart aids...but keep it quiet. When hawthorn worked for me, I wouldn't tell my MD how I'd beaten atrial fib -- for the nonce. I knew he'd tell AMA, they'd tell FDA, then ZAP! hawthorn would be BANNED.
Tom

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