Eating yogurt daily can help women tame high BP

Ladies, you may want to include yogurt in your diet as a recent study has suggested that its daily consumption can reduce your risk of high blood pressure by a fifth.

Lead author Justin Buendia from Boston University said that no one food is a magic bullet but adding yogurt to an otherwise healthy diet seems to help reduce the long-term risk of high blood pressure in women.

Researchers analyzed data on participants in two Nurses' Health Study cohorts (NHS and NHS II), mostly women between 25-55 years old, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, mostly men between 40-75 years old.

During 18 to 30 years of follow-up, researchers documented 74,609 new cases of high blood pressure in the three study groups. After adjusting for other risk factors and diet, they found that women from the two NHS groups who ate five or more servings of yogurt per week (compared with those consuming one serving per month) had about a 20 percent reduction in the risk of developing high blood pressure, which was statistically significant.

Men in this study had much lower intakes of yogurt than women and, perhaps as a result, the effects of regular yogurt consumption were weaker.

Additionally, researchers noted that several servings of milk and cheese each day also had beneficial effects on blood pressure "although the effects of yogurt seemed stronger than other forms of dairy," Buendia said.

The study has been presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology/Lifestyle 2016 Scientific Sessions.