Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
What’s more important for healthy blood pressure, lowering your sodium intake or increasing calcium? That was the focus of a 1984 newsletter article. It reviewed a study showing higher dietary calcium intake was associated with lower risk of hypertension.
Today, hypertension research would be more likely to look at the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, rather than specific minerals. DASH is an eating pattern that emphasizes foods such as fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, whole grains and healthful dairy products, which are rich in nutrients that support healthy blood pressure, including potassium, magnesium and calcium. The diet has been consistently shown to lower blood pressure in people with hypertension.
That example shows that rather than focusing on individual nutrients in managing chronic disease risk (like heart disease and diabetes), today we look at the dietary pattern as a whole. This means the overall combination of foods and beverages we consume day in and day out. Individual nutrients don’t always give the whole picture. Foods contain complex combinations of nutrients that may interact and be more beneficial together than alone.
“In addition, foods contain thousands of phytochemicals, which may themselves have beneficial effects on health,” says Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, director of Tufts’ HNRCA Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory and executive editor of Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter. “Since phytochemicals are not present in the vast majority of nutritional supplements, the only way to ensure we get enough of them is to eat whole foods that constitute a healthy dietary pattern.”
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How has hypertension research evolved since the 1984 newsletter article?