The Benefits of Hibiscus Tea for High Blood Pressure

Watch the video on TikTok

Transcript

Drink Hibiscus tea if you have high blood pressure. What the science? Tea Edition Part 2. A 2022 meta-analysis analyzed 12 studies on Hibiscus and blood pressure. They usually lasted around a month and compared drinking Hibiscus tea to a placebo, as well as to drinking other teas, dietary interventions, and even a handful of different blood pressure lowering medications. The results? Hibiscus tea does seem to lower systolic blood pressure, the larger number. By anywhere from 5 to 10%, and it had a smaller, but not quite statistically significant impact on the diastolic blood pressure, the lower number. But here's where it gets really interesting. Compared to other teas, it was only a bit better, not statistically significantly so. Like in this 2019 trial that compared Hibiscus with green tea, and the Hibiscus lowered it by like 5% and the green tea by 4%. Hibiscus was also pretty similar to dietary interventions, specifically to lower blood pressure, which on the one hand is great because drinking a couple cups of tea is way easier than changing your whole diet. But a healthy diet is a good idea for many other reasons. But now for the kicker, the big one, the Grand Cahuna. In four separate clinical trials comparing drinking Hibiscus tea to blood pressure, lowering medications, the results of the two were comparable. No statistically significant difference between the blood pressure drugs ability to lower blood pressure and Hibiscus teas, although the drugs did trend to a somewhat larger effect. And research shows that the way Hibiscus works is by acting like an ACE inhibitor, similar to how many of these drugs work, which I guess makes sense. But this does not mean that you should throw away your drugs and head to the T store. Most of these Hibiscus trials were very short-term, small, and had some risk of bias. So the overall amount of data on it is way lower than that of the drugs. So more research needed, but in the meantime, the tea probably won't hurt and it's tasty.

Additional notes

⚠️WARNING: Always talk to your doctor about any medical intervention, especially anything aimed at treating conditions like high blood pressure. There can be negative interactions with various medications, and even if you’re someone who would see a blood pressure lowering effect from this, that has to be taken into account as part of the whole treatment plan! A study comparing hibiscus to the DASH diet found that combining the two was more effective than the diet alone 📚Studies: DOI: 10.1093/nutrit/nuab104 PMID: 15330492 Does Hibiscus Tea Lower Blood Pressure? #science #health #nutrition #tea #bloodpressure

References