This diet is known as DASH, or Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. DASH is emerging as better than anything else, including drugs, to control potentially deadly high blood pressure that afflicts 50 million Americans. Sheldon Sheps, MD, chairman of the JNC and a professor emeritus at the Mayo Clinic, noted that as many as three-quarters of hypertensives don't have adequate control of their blood pressure, either because they do not comply with suggested lifestyle or dietary changes or because they stop taking antihypertensive drugs due to their costs or side effects. A total of 459 adults at four academic medical centers participated in the new Archives of Internal Medicine study. The researchers wanted a majority of black participants because previous studies showed blacks are 40 percent more likely than whites to have high blood pressure.
Blacks also tend to develop it earlier and with greater severity, according to the study.
At the end of the eight weeks of the study, researchers found that participants who ate the DASH diet significantly lowered their blood pressure. Black participants, in particular, benefited. We are talking about a diet with the potential of preventing and treating hypertension and doing it particularly well in people at risk, African Americans and people with high blood pressure,'' said Laura Svetkey, MD, associate professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and lead author of the study. Svetkey added that the study, half of whose subjects were women, offers additional proof that the DASH diet helps to lower blood pressure in women, whose hypertension problems have been studied less often than men's. DASH combination diet may be an effective strategy for preventing and treating hypertension in a broad cross section of the population, including segments of the population at high risk for hypertension and its complications.