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Health Check: The Link Between Eating Protein and Blood Pressure

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12/11/2014

The Link Between Eating Protein and Blood Pressure

BBC World Service - Health Check, The Link Between Eating Protein and Blood Pressure

Why eating eggs, meat and nuts can help keep blood pressure low

Why eating protein can keep blood pressure low; Recovery letters from the ex-depressed  to help the currently depressed; How a soldier from WW1 is contributing to science today.

For many years people have been advised to eat a low fat, high fibre diet and to avoid eating large quantities of meat and too many eggs. But a study which followed more than 5,000 people for 30 years has found that people who ate more protein - whether from eggs, meat, fish or nuts - had lower blood pressure than others who ate less protein. Lynne Moore, associate professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine explains what she found.  

Recovery Letters
When someone is experiencing depression they find it hard to believe that they will ever feel better. Occasionally the despair becomes so great that people feel suicidal. To try and help combat this, a new British website has been set up where people who used to feel desperate write open letters to anyone who might be currently  feeling that way. It is called Recovery letters and was set up by James Withey. He spent his career working in suicide prevention before finding himself very depressed himself. 

WW1 Dysentery
A soldier from World War One has contributed to modern science in a way he can never have imagined. In the trenches, Private Ernest Cable contracted bacillary dysentery, a disease which today still kills hundreds of thousands of people in low income countries. A sample from the soldier, which has been stored since 1915, has now led scientists to make an extraordinary discovery; that the bacteria were resistant to the antibiotic penicillin, even though antibiotics were not discovered for another 13 years. Kate Barker and Alison Mather, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, conducted the research which has just been published in the Lancet.

(Photo: Eggs, white fish fillet and chicken breast. Credit: Getty Images)

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