Do you know that millions of tiny creatures living in your gut can help you lower your blood pressure?
Yes, you heard it right. These tiny creatures are called the gut microbiota.
They are small, invisible to the naked eye, and are many in number. In simple terms, they are like your body’s tiny helpers.
High Blood Pressure: A Worldwide Issue
Now, you might be wondering why we are talking about blood pressure. Well, high blood pressure, also called hypertension, is a big health problem all over the world.
It’s like a silent villain that causes a lot of harm without making a noise. Many people have high blood pressure, but they don’t know about it until it’s too late.
Out of every five people who have hypertension, four are not able to control it well, even if they take medicines or change their lifestyle. This means we need to find new ways to fight this silent villain.
The Tiny Helpers in Your Gut
Over the last ten years, scientists have been studying the tiny helpers in our gut. They found out that these helpers and the stuff they make can control our blood pressure.
One thing that helps them do their job is dietary fiber. This is the stuff in our food that our body can’t digest fully. When it reaches our large intestine, our tiny helpers break it down.
This process changes the types of helpers in our gut and also makes some chemicals called short-chain fatty acids or SCFAs for short.
You can remember them as “super cool friendly acids.” Two of these SCFAs are called acetate and butyrate.
An Amazing Discovery
Scientists at Monash University did a study to understand how these super cool friendly acids work. They found out that they can lower the blood pressure of people with hypertension.
This discovery is amazing because it could help a lot of people control their blood pressure better.
In the past, other scientists found that if we add acetate and butyrate to our food, they can lower our blood pressure.
In this new study, the scientists used a special kind of fiber that makes a lot of acetate and butyrate when our tiny helpers digest it. This fiber is called acetylated and butyrylated high amylose maize, or HAMSAB for short.
The scientists gave this special fiber to 20 people with high blood pressure for three weeks.
They found that the blood pressure of these people went down a lot. In fact, it went down as much as if they had taken a medicine for high blood pressure.
It’s More than Just Diet
The scientists also found that after the people ate the special fiber, they had a lot more of the super cool friendly acids in their blood.
This means that the special fiber helped their tiny helpers make more super cool friendly acids than they would have if the people just ate regular food.
This study tells us that the super cool friendly acids, which our tiny helpers make, can lower our blood pressure.
So, if we eat foods that help our tiny helpers make more of these acids, we can control our high blood pressure better. This is great news because it could help a lot of people around the world.
What’s Next?
This study is just the beginning. We still have a lot to learn about our tiny helpers and how they can help us control our blood pressure.
In the future, we might even have new treatments for high blood pressure that involve changing the types of tiny helpers in our gut.
In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about how to control your blood pressure, you might want to read about how cannabis can increase the risk of death in people with high blood pressure.
You might also find it interesting that a common nutrient could help lower high blood pressure.
There are also other studies that show how too much sugar in our diet can increase our blood pressure, and how vitamin D might help people with diabetes control their blood pressure.
If you care about high blood pressure, please read studies about blood pressure drugs that could increase heart failure risk, and common high blood pressure drugs may have dangerous side effects.
For more information about blood pressure health, please see recent studies about common juice that could help reduce high blood pressure, and results showing the new advice for treating high blood pressure.
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