Green tea controls high blood pressure

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Green tea controls high blood pressure

     High blood pressure places a serious burden on the vascular system and contributes to atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis will in turn precipitate heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. The cause of high blood pressure is not yet fully understood, but it is clear that a chemical called angiotensin II plays a role in high blood pressure due to essential hypertension and to arterial stenosis of the kidneys. Blood contains the substance angiotensinogen which is transformed to angiotensin I under action of the enzyme renin in the kidneys. Another enzyme called the "Angiotensin Converting Enzyme" (ACE) then changes angiotensin I to angiotensin II, which is an extremely strong vascular constrictor. It is the constriction of the blood vessels caused by this constrictor that leads to high blood pressure.

     Dr. Hara 9) has shown that green tea catechin impedes the action of ACE and suppresses production of angiotensin II. He has also demonstrated that administration of catechin to Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat (SHR) could limit increases in the rats' blood pressure. SHR are rats used as models for human high blood pressure experiments, and their blood pressure at the start of the experiment (when they were five weeks old) was 130- 140mmHg. By the age of about 10 weeks, after a diet of normal feed, their blood pressure had risen to more than 200mmHg. But the blood pressure of those rats raised with 0.5% catechin added to their feed remained below 200mmHg. Exchanging the feed of the two rat groups at 16 weeks of age led to a reversal in blood pressure between the two groups. These results indicate that green tea catechin has the ability to prevent a rise in blood pressure. If the amount of catechin used in this experiment is converted to the amount of green tea normally drunk by humans, it is equivalent to drinking about 10 moderately large cups of tea per day.

     These are surely quite significant results in suggesting, as they do, that the daily consumption of green tea can prevent high blood pressure.

9) Y. Hara, T. Matsuzaki and T.Suzuki, Nippon Nogeikagaku Kaishi,61,803 (1987),

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