Pomegranate Juice and a Healthy Heart

If there's a fruit that's undergone a meteoric rise to fame, it's the pomegranate. This luscious, red fruit, also known as the Chinese apple, is renowned as much for its health benefits as for its taste. When you drink pomegranate juice, or enjoy the whole fruit, you get vitamin C, fiber - and a hefty dose of antioxidant compounds called polyphenols. The pomegranate fruit and its juice are believed to be heart-healthy, and research is underway to look at its effect on diabetes and cancer - particularly prostate cancer. Now, there's more good news about the pomegranate fruit, drinking pomegranate juice could help to lower blood pressure.

Drinking Pomegranate Juice to Lower Blood Pressure:

Researchers at the Queen Margaret University recently looked at the blood-pressure lowering benefits of pomegranate juice. They recruited 20 volunteers to take part in a study. They gave half of the participants 500 milliliter of pomegranate juice and the other ten a similar amount of water to drink each day. They monitored their blood pressure closely during the study and seven days after its completion.

Did drinking pomegranate juice have any effect on the blood pressure levels in this twenty people? When they took each volunteer's blood pressure before and after they exercised, diastolic and systolic blood pressures were lower in the group who drank pomegranate juice compared to those who drank water.

Researchers also monitored the amounts of the stress hormone cortisol in the urine of the participants. When cortisol levels go up, it leads to blood pressure elevations by causing the body to hold on to more sodium. They found that the participants who drank pomegranate juice had lower levels of active cortisol than the group who didn't. It may be that drinking pomegranate juice lowers blood pressure by reducing cortisol levels.

High cortisol levels also cause other problems in the body such as elevated blood sugar levels, and it causes the immune system to be suppressed. So lowering cortisol levels has multiple benefits - and drinking pomegranate juice may be one way to do it.

Drink Pomegranate Juice for a Healthy Heart?

There's another way drinking pomegranate juice boosts heart health. According to a study published in the International Journal of Vitamin and Nutrition Research, drinking concentrated pomegranate juice lowers total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, the "bad" form that's linked with heart disease. It also helps to reduce LDL oxidation, a problem that leads to coronary artery disease and heart attacks.

Pomegranate Juice to Lower Blood Pressure?

This is only a small study, but it looks promising. Pomegranate juice could be a natural way to lower blood pressure. Combine this with its other potential heart-healthy benefits, and you have a juice that's worth sipping. But talk to your doctor before drinking pomegranate juice if you're on medications, it may alter the blood levels of some drugs.


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