The two-ingredient salad that could lower your blood pressure reading

Dr Chris Steele shares diet tips on reducing blood pressure

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Having high blood pressure means your heart is having to work harder than usual to pump blood around the body. And over time it puts extra strain on the organs. If left untreated this can lead to a number life-threatening conditions such as strokes and heart disease.

One of the causes of high blood pressure is diet.

Specifically eating too much salt and not enough fruit and vegetables can cause it to rise.

Therefore, diet can also help lower levels.

A combination of two ingredients added as a side dish to your meals could be one way to help achieve this.

Both spinach and balsamic vinegar are theorised to have blood pressure-lowering qualities, aside from making a tasty dish together.

A study, published in Clinical Nutrition Research, in 2015 found that eating spinach daily for a week lowered both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.

The research team, from St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, concluded the benefits came from the high nitrate content of the spinach.

According to the Food Standards Agency, spinach is one of the main sources of dietary nitrate, alongside lettuce.

Nitrates are able to dilate – widen or relax – arteries and the veins. This reduces stress on the heart by improving blood flow to the heart muscle.

As part of the study, 27 participants with “normal” blood pressure were recruited.

They were given either a high-nitrate (spinach – with 845 mg of nitrates) or low-nitrate soup (asparagus – with 0.6 mg of nitrate a day).

The study said: “High versus low-nitrate intervention also reduced central systolic and diastolic blood pressure and brachial systolic blood pressure at 180 minutes following seven day supplementation only.

“These findings suggest that dietary nitrate from spinach may contribute to beneficial hemodynamic effects of vegetable-rich diets and highlights the potential of developing a targeted dietary approach in the management of elevated blood pressure.”

Systolic pressure is the higher number when you test your blood pressure and refers to the force at which your heart pumps blood around your body. Diastolic pressure (the lower number) is the resistance to the blood flow in the blood vessels.

High blood pressure is considered to be 140/90 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) or higher (or 150/90mmHg or higher if you’re over the age of 80).

Research has also shown the blood pressure lowering benefits of balsamic vinegar.

One study published in the Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry journal in 2001, concluded that a certain component of vinegar could help tackle hypertension.

It said: “As a result, it was observed that acetic acid itself, the main component of vinegar, significantly reduced both blood pressure and renin activity compared to controls given no acetic acid or vinegar, as well as vinegar.

“As for the mechanism of this function, it was suggested that this reduction in blood pressure may be caused by the significant reduction in renin activity and the subsequent decrease in angiotensin II.

“From this study, it was also suggested that the antihypertensive effect of vinegar is mainly due to the acetic acid in it.”

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