United States – Increasing portions of fruits and vegetables may control blood pressure and bolster heart health as they help decrease acids in the body, a clinical trial says.
Individuals who incorporate two to four servings of fruits and vegetables in their diet were found to have lower blood pressure, decreased cases of heart diseases, and better kidney disease trials conducted, as shown in the American Journal of Medicine publication on August 6, as reported by HealthDay.
Dietary Recommendations for Hypertension
“This supports our recommendation that fruits and vegetables should be ‘foundational’ treatment for patients with hypertension because we accomplish all three goals [kidney health, lower blood pressure, and reduced heart attack disease risk] with fruits and vegetables, and we can do so with lower medication doses,” said researcher Maninder Kahlon, an associate professor of population health with the University of Texas at Austin Medical School.
In other words, the researchers said that patients should be forced to take more fruits and vegetables before doctors start them on their blood pressure medicine.
Challenges and Benefits of Dietary Interventions
“Dietary interventions for chronic disease management are often not recommended and even less often executed because of the many challenges to getting patients to implement them,” explained lead researcher Dr. Donald Wesson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin. Nevertheless, they are effective, and in this instance, kidney—and cardiovascular-protective.”
“We must increase our efforts to incorporate them into patient management and, more broadly, make healthy diets more accessible to populations at increased risk for kidney and cardiovascular disease,” Wesson added in a journal news release.
The clinical trial was informed by studies that were done before, where it was seen that high animal protein diets caused high levels of blood acid, and the kidneys would be under much pressure to filter those acids from the blood, Wesson said.
“We hypothesized that one way that fruits and vegetables are both kidney- and heart-healthy is that they reduce the amount of acid in the diet and therefore the amount of acid that kidneys have to remove from the body,” Wesson explained.
Study Design and Findings
In the trial, researchers assigned 153 patients with high blood pressure and highly acidic blood to three groups for the study.
The first one consumed increased amounts of fruits and vegetables, the second one took two tablets containing sodium bicarbonate per day, while the third one continued with standard protocol.
In fact, the kidneys of those who took sodium bicarbonate were healthier at the end of the study than those who remained in the control group, as reported by HealthDay.
Also, those consuming more fruits and veggies also required a reduced amount of blood pressure medication.