New Study: The Right Amount of This Vitamin Could Lower High Blood Pressure

Struggling with high blood pressure can feel like a balancing act. Called a “silent killer” because it often does not come with any symptoms, high blood pressure describes what happens when the force of your blood pushing against your artery walls is too high.

This can cause damage to your arteries over time, leading to heart attacks, stroke and heart disease. High blood pressure is a widespread problem, with the World Health Organization reporting there are about 1.28 billion adults between the ages of 30 and 79 with the condition.

To manage your blood pressure, doctors often recommend adopting a generally healthy lifestyle through a balanced diet, regular physical activity and avoiding harmful habits like smoking or drinking alcohol. There are also more specific choices you can make to protect your heart health, though—and a new study indicates that ensuring you have enough of one crucial vitamin could make a major difference.

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Led by Spanish researchers in collaboration with Harvard University’s school of public health, a team of doctors and food scientists aimed to identify a link between high blood pressure and vitamin D consumption, with previous research indicating that adequate vitamin D levels could protect cardiovascular health.

To examine this, the researchers followed 16,437 participants who completed questionnaires about their dietary habits. The team estimated participants’ vitamin D levels using a predictive model that considered many variables, including age, sex, vitamin D intake from diet and supplements, body mass index, skin reaction to sun exposure (which stimulates the body’s natural production of vitamin D), time spent walking each day, and hours spent in the sun daily during the summer.

Participants also self-reported whether they were newly diagnosed with high blood pressure. When the researchers checked back in with participants after more than a decade on average, 2,338 participants reported that indeed they’d been diagnosed with hypertension—and the researchers observed an interesting trend.

The participants with higher vitamin D levels were less likely to develop high blood pressure, while participants with the highest levels had a 30% lower chance of developing high blood pressure than those with the lowest levels. Even with a small rise in vitamin D levels (as little as a predicted increase of one nanogram per milliliter of blood, according to the study authors), the risk of high blood pressure dropped by 7%.

These findings suggest that consuming adequate vitamin D could be an important part of managing your blood pressure and protecting your cardiovascular wellness. You can boost your vitamin D levels by getting a few minutes of sunlight each day (wearing sunscreen and protective apparel), eating foods rich in vitamin D like fatty fish, eggs and fortified dairy products, or taking a vitamin D supplement.

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