The nutritional wealth of walnuts

Walnuts are the fruit of the walnut tree or the Juglans Regio genus. This is one of the most widespread varieties in Europe, to the southeast and center of Asia and China. In general, it’s a food that’s valued for its nutritional content and bioactive components.

These qualities give it a series of beneficial properties for our health. Among these, for example, we can mention its beneficial effect when it comes to reducing arterial pressure. In fact, walnuts reduce blood pressure.

What’s more, they’re a type of nut, a food that’s highly recognized for its ability to improve wellbeing. In fact, eating nuts has been popular for a long time, especially within the Mediterranean diet. That’s because evidence shows that they have a positive effect on cardiac and brain health.

• Specifically, this variety of foods consists of 65 % fat and 15 % de protein.
• Plus, they barely contain carbohydrates, and many of those carbs that they do contain are in the form of fiber.
• Meanwhile, they stand out because they contain polyunsaturated fatty acids. In particular, there’s alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), one of the omega 3 fatty acids.
• At the same time, they offer significant amounts of vitamins E and B6 and minerals like potassium, copper, and phosphorous.

How do walnuts reduce blood pressure?

As we’ve seen, one of the nutritional components of nuts is alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). A recent study by Pennsylvania State University found a relationship between walnut consumption and improved cardiovascular health.

Scientists determined that people that added walnuts to their diet regularly had lower blood pressure that those who consumed the same diet without walnuts. What’s more, they concluded that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats in your diet offers other benefits on a cardiovascular level.

So, the results suggest that walnuts reduce blood pressure thanks to their interesting lipid profile with alpha-linolenic acid. However, not all of their benefits have to do with this component.

The role of other nutrients like tocopherols, phenolic acids, melatonin, and flavonoids also is important. These have antioxidant properties that protect endothelial function and reduce oxidative damage to the arteries.

The right diet for high blood pressure

High blood pressure is a health problem that affects many people and needs to be kept under control. Preventing high blood pressure and controlling high values if one suffers from the illness is important for reducing negative effects. This also reduces mortality and morbidity due to coronary causes.

Fortunately, implementing small changes in your lifestyle is one of the best ways to go about it.  In this sense, the healthiest habits include the following : 

• Stay physically active. Try to exercise every day.
• Maintain a healthy weight.
• Try to keep your stress levels under control. Physical exercise is one of the best stress-control activities. However, you can also try yoga, tai chi, meditation, massage, etc.
• Avoid harmful habits like tobacco and alcohol.
• Eat healthily.

Limiting your sodium intake is another one of the most common recommendations for diets that reduce high blood pressure. This practice is positive for older adults as well as those with diabetes mellitus.

Similarly, it’s important to boost your total intake of other minerals that should be abundant in your diet. These include magnesium, potassium, and calcium, among others.

Therefore, it’s important to also boost your intake of foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts (especially walnuts), and low-fat dairy products.

There has been a great deal of research on the DASH diet (a nutritional approach for hypertension). Scientific evidence suggests that combining this diet with low sodium intake reduces systolic arterial pressure.

Eating walnuts daily reduces high blood pressure

Within the context of a healthy diet, like the Mediterranean or DASH diet, consuming foods like nuts can contribute to the prevention of high blood pressure and its harmful effects. Of course, it’s also important to adopt other healthy habits.