Earlier this week, research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition documented the power of orange juice to keep blood pressure in check. Now comes a report (soon to be published in the same journal) from researchers at the University of East Anglia and Harvard claiming that blueberries do what orange juice does, possibly better. An East Anglia news release 
reports that researchers studied 134,000 women and 47,000 men from the Harvard established cohorts, the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study over a period of 14 years. During the study, 35,000 participants developed hypertension. When the researchers looked at the relation between individual subclasses of flavonoids and hypertension, they found that participants consuming the highest amounts of anthocyanins (found mainly in blueberries and strawberries in this US-based population) were eight per cent less likely to be diagnosed with hypertension than those consuming the lowest amounts. The effect was strongest for blueberry rather than strawberry consumption. Compared to people who ate no blueberries, those eating at least one serving of blueberries per week were 10 per cent less likely to become hypertensive.
Read more from the University of East Anglia.
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What other variables were controlled? What statistics were used? How largw an efffect was observed? Was the effect similar for men and women? How representative of the male population are male nurses?
Without such data your articles is a useless waste of time.
Ditto Selwyn Becker. While all we are given is the ‘interpretation’ of the study, it would be nice to know what other factors were observed that may have been the greater contributors to development of HTN, eg diabetes, obesity, and simply age(14 yrs). I would like to think eating blueberries will keep me healthy and alive forever, but…
And we must be careful about statistics from the University of East Anglia!
Although these reports are preliminary studies for food and blood pressure relationships, the strongest relationship between hypertension and food is sodium consumption. If I could find a way to eat more Chinese food which I love this would be wonderful.