Effective against hypertension Reduce high blood pressure with red chilies?

Chilies can reduce blood pressure in hypertension in the long term

Hypertension is a veritable folk disease. Therefore, the research endeavors worldwide to find suitable therapies that sustainably lower blood pressure. Not only medicines play a role here, but also foods that help to reduce high blood pressure. Chinese scientists led by Zhiming Zhu of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing have investigated the effect of capsaicin on the blood vessels in Chili's herbicide. The results of the seven-month long-term study were published in the journal "Cell Metabolism".

On the one hand, Zhu describes the molecular process that leads to lowering blood pressure and also presents the results of his seven-month long-term study, which empirically investigates the relationship between chilli and blood pressure. This shows that capsaicin has clearly contributed to a reduction in blood pressure in experiments on laboratory rats with chronic high blood pressure. The capsaicin added to the feed results in increased nitric oxide release in the rat's metabolism, which relaxes the walls of the blood vessels, expands them and decreases blood pressure.

Whether the results can be easily transferred to humans, it will be for Zhu in subsequent studies to investigate. However, he starts from an equally clear result. A clue already provides him today, the different distribution of the population with high blood pressure in China. In southwestern China, for example, significantly more chilli is consumed than in the north-east, where only 10 to 14 percent of the population has high blood pressure compared to 20 percent in the northeast.

If the results are confirmed, people suffering from high blood pressure may in future be able to do without expensive antihypertensive medication and instead take a good dose of chili. If the traditional chillies are too hot, they also have the option to switch to a milder version that does not contain capsaicin, but an active ingredient that Zhu's scientists believe has a similar blood pressure lowering effect.

In Germany, almost 25% of the population currently suffer from high blood pressure (hypertension), the z. B. can be caused by the impairments of the cardiovascular system, by hormonal problems, metabolic diseases or kidney damage. But even a wrong diet, lack of exercise and stress can be the cause of high blood pressure. This is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, kidney failure or heart attacks. Therefore, hypertension should definitely be medically treated and regularly monitored.

If the results of the Third Military Medical University study confirm in the following human test, increased chili drug use provides a good option for conventional conventional medicine to combat high blood pressure. (sb, fp)