Whey to Go
Whey protein is one food component you can look for when after foods that can help lower blood pressure.
Hypertension (or elevated blood pressure) is one of the leading risk factors for cardiovascular disease – the number one leading cause of death worldwide. When a person has hypertension he is at greater risk of suffering from myocardial infarct and heart failure. So to avoid having this fate, one needs to lower blood pressure.
There are a lot of medications used to help lower one’s blood pressure, while there are also non-medical approaches to lowering blood pressure. Good lifestyle practices such as having regular physical activities and indulging in healthy foods can be a risk reducer.
When it comes to healthy foods to lower blood pressure, fruits and vegetables would usually come first in our minds. There is nothing wrong with that if, we will eat those fruits and vegetables cooked or prepared healthily. For example: Mangoes without bagoong and your veggies not cooked with too much salt. But why the need to take on salt reduction when you need to lower blood pressure? The reason behind this is that salt provides a big amount of sodium.
Salt is composed of sodium and chloride, and sodium takes 40% of the combination. Sodium, not only from salt, has been seen from many epidemiological studies as associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure. Having this association, people are encouraged to take minimal amounts of sodium, with recommendations as low as only 2500 mg/day - sodium found in a teaspoon of salt. The efficacy of reduced sodium intake has been well established.
Sometimes, the approach to having a good diet is not at all just reducing intake of negative nutrients. Nowadays, the inclusion of healthier ingredients or foods in the diet is, by far, more encouraging to a person. For this example, when one cannot really remove so much salt or salty foods from his diet, the person can also try to include foods which have components that help bring down blood pressure. Whey protein is an example of a food component that you can look for when you are after foods that can help lower blood pressure.
In one interesting study, young adults in early stages of developing high blood pressure experienced significant decrease in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure after six weeks of drinking a whey-rich beverage every day, regardless if the whey protein component is hydrolyzed or not (hydrolyzed whey proteins contain anti-hypertensive peptides). Study participants who had elevated blood pressure benefited from the consumption of the beverage but not those with normal blood pressure.
The result of this study is an amazing breakthrough because, once again, we have found that food can be a complementary (if not an alternative to medicine) ingredient in lowering blood pressure. Equally important to lowering blood pressure is that, whey protein (at least in this study), did not effect blood pressure lowering to normotensive individuals as hypotension (low blood pressure) can also be a health risk (especially to young women and elders).
While whey protein will now be popular with this study results, we still encourage the population to really make an effort to reduce sodium intake. The presence of a single good ingredient in a food cannot totally erase the health risks that the other negative ingredients bring about. – Article courtesy of Manila Bulletin
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