Soy and Blood Pressure

There’s long been controversy about whether soy foods can lower the bad cholesterol or not. Maybe it’s time to look at another indication – high blood pressure. A report in the Archives of Internal Medicine describes a small study in 60 postmenopausal women. The women took soy nuts containing 25 grams of soy protein in a standard diet for 8 weeks. After this, they crossed over to a diet without soy nuts for another 8 weeks. (Some women took the soy-free diet first, and then the soy nuts diet.)

Adding soy nuts lowered systolic blood pressure 9.9% and diastolic blood pressure 6.8% in hypertensive women. The decline was a more modest - 5.2% systolic and 2.9% diastolic – in women who had blood pressures in the normal range to begin with. The diet with nuts also lowered low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol 11% and in hypertensive women, but had no effect on lipids in ‘normotensive’ women.
These benefits were described by the investigators as being "comparable with those seen with antihypertensive drugs." I guess they (the results) are ideally suited to start another controversy among the so-called soy experts. And, in the meantime, there are Chocolate Soy Nuts, which can double the benefits with half the taste.

Comments

[MorningSun]

Is there any information concerning, those who have a heart murmur should not be eating soy products?

[Robert Griffith]

Morning Sun:
Heart murmurs are fairly frequent, and often of no significance - see: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/heartmurmur/hmurmur_what.html. Your doctor can tell you what the importance of your murmur is - whether it should restrict your activities or diet, and so on. It's very unlikely that eating soy would make any difference to your heart, but it's better to be safe than sorry - it depends on what sort of murmur you have and its likely cause. So ask your doctor.