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What You Eat May Affect Your Level of Blood Pressure! When a person’s blood pressure reading reaches 140/90 or higher, he or she is said to have hypertension, or high blood pressure. It is estimated that about 1 billion people globally are affected by this disease. It is known to be a risk factor for stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure. A group of researchers from Imperial College London is trying to find out how the relationship between metabolic patterns of people around the world and their blood pressure. They did find compounds in the urine that lead to surprising differences affecting blood pressure level, based not on genes but on what they eat and their gut bacteria. They published the findings in the Nature on April 20, 2008 and hope this can help develop new drugs or even non-drug therapy to fight high blood pressure. Urine samples from 4,630 people in the United States, Britain, Japan and China were analyzed. Despite the fact that Britons have similar lifestyle, diet, ethnic mixes with Americans, the researchers discovered that the metabolic patterns were actually related to the diet and lifestyle, and gut microorganisms instead of genetics.
Bacteria in the intestines and colon help digest and break down food. In fact, several recent studies have suggested that humans and their gut bacteria have a truly symbiotic relationship. Drug-like effects were found to be released by some of the compounds. These breakdown products in human urine are known as metabolites, which were analyzed to see if they are link to heart disease. Though the study only scratches the surface, the researchers managed to identify 4 such compounds linking with blood pressure differences. High salt intake has been accused as the main culprit for causing high blood pressure. To find out more about salt and blood pressure, just visit the following: More Articles on Relationship between Salt and Blood Pressure On the other hand, diets rich in vegetables and certain minerals and consistent exercise can actually lower blood pressure. Formic acid (or formate) was one of the 4 compounds found in the study. So far, the role of formic acid in the body was not known much. What we know is it is the thing that makes ant or bee stings hurt. It may be involved in processing chloride from salt in the kidney. Therefore, if we can modulate formate metabolism, maybe you can modulate blood pressure as well. Another compound found was alanine, which is the level of an amino acid. People with higher levels of alanine in their urine had higher blood pressure. The researchers had earlier found that people who eat more meat and other animal products had higher alanine levels.
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