This Healthy Vegetable Causes High Blood PressureFruits and vegetables are generally considered healthy and number one recommendation to lower blood pressure is often to eat more veggies.

But there is a hidden danger in that.

Because one type of vegetable has been found to actually raise blood pressure in a new study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

And it only gets weirder as one of the unhealthiest versions of this vegetable was proven to NOT raise blood pressure.

The study concluded that people who eat four or more servings of potatoes per week have an increased risk of high blood pressure.

It all began when the authors cited previous research that found that people who took potassium supplements had lower blood pressure than their peers did, and studies that showed that high glycemic carbohydrates increase blood pressure.

Since potatoes are stuffed with potassium (potentially blood pressure lowering) and high glycemic carbohydrates (potentially blood pressure increasing), they wondered which of the potassium and carbohydrates would have the biggest effect.

To investigate this, they examined information collected by previous studies: that of 62,175 women in the Nurses’ Health Study, that of 88,475 women in the Nurses’ Health Study II, and that of 36,803 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

The researchers ranked their subjects from lightest to heaviest potato intake, based on a detailed food consumption questionnaire they completed every four years. They used physicians’ diagnosis of hypertension as a blood pressure guide.

Those who ate less than one portion per month had the lowest risk, while those who ate four or more portions per week had the highest risk.

This result held for both smokers and non-smokers, the slim and obese, and those who engaged in a little and a lot of physical activity. Findings remained the same when they excluded people with respectively high and low alcohol, grain, meat, fish, oil, fiber, potassium, salt, and sweetened drink consumption.

There are, however, a few confusions in this study:

First, four or more weekly servings of baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes increased the blood pressure risk for women, but not for men.

Unsurprisingly, French fries increased the risk for everyone.

Second, potato chips (or crisps if you are British) had no effect on blood pressure at all. The fact that these are just heavily fried versions of French fries with even more salt than their hot counterparts is bewildering indeed.

While explaining the importance of the study, they mentioned that the British NHS, American school feeding programs, and fruit and American vegetable cash voucher WIC programs recommended potatoes for near daily intake, and explained that these would probably have to be replaced with non-starchy vegetables.

If this study is right, however, they can also be comfortably replaced with potato chips. Imagine how happy the children will be!

Until scientists can sort out this confusion, it is prudent to eat no more than three portions of potatoes per week (including potato chips.)

If this sounds too difficult, our highly acclaimed blood pressure exercises, found here, can drop your blood pressure below 120/80 – no matter what your potato consumption is…