Consuming three tablespoons of milled flax a day can significantly reduce the incidence of strokes and heart attacks for people with high blood pressure, according to a new study.
The groundbreaking research provides a defibrillator’s jolt to a crop that has been flat lining since the 2009 discovery of an unapproved genetically modified line of flax in a shipment to Europe.
“This is probably the most optimistic piece of research that we’ve gotten to date,” said Flax Council of Canada president Will Hill.
Researchers divided 110 Winnipeg heart disease patients into two groups.
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One group was fed 30 grams of milled flax a day for six months.
The flax was included in bagels, buns, bars, muffins and pasta that were delivered to their homes every month.
The other group received a flax look-alike placebo in their food items made out of wheat, bran and molasses.
The data show the flax group’s systolic blood pressure (SBP), which is the top number in a blood pressure reading, was lowered by 10 millimetres of mercury (mmHg), while their diastolic blood pressure (DBP), which is the bottom number, was lowered by seven mmHG.
“That equates to about a 50 percent drop in strokes and about a 30 percent drop in heart attacks,” said lead investigator Grant Pierce, executive director of research at St. Boniface General Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba.
“It’s huge. We couldn’t have ended up with better results.”
The findings became even more impressive when isolating the 75 percent of patients in the study with hypertension. They had a 15 mmHg drop in their SBP level and a seven mmHg decrease in their DBP readings, which equated to a 50 percent drop in stroke and heart attack risk.
“That is the largest drop in blood pressure ever shown by any dietary intervention,” said Pierce.
The results are better than those offered by the highly touted DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), which promotes diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grain, and low-fat dairy food and the limiting of sugar-sweetened drinks, red meat and added fats.
Rachel Johnson, chair of the American Heart Association’s nutrition committee, said the findings have raised eyebrows in medical circles.
“It certainly is intriguing,” she said.
Johnson said the methodology used in the study appears to be “robust,” but it needs to be peer reviewed to see if it holds up under scrutiny.
She is impressed with the subject size and duration of the study and the fact that it was a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial, which Pierce said is fancy talk for saying it was as tightly controlled and unbiased as possible.
Johnson would like to see the study replicated under different circumstances to see if the results can be duplicated.
She acknowledged that the initial findings showing such a dramatic drop in blood pressure are impressive, but she stressed taking flax shouldn’t be thought of as a replacement for the DASH diet.
Johnson also said consuming three tablespoons of milled flax per day would add 90 calories to a patient’s daily diet, and those calories would have to be subtracted somewhere else.
Pierce is in the process of submitting his research for peer review in a health journal.
He is also attempting to line up funding for future studies to answer questions about how and why consuming milled flax has such a dramatic impact on blood pressure levels and who can benefit the most from eating it.
His hunch is that there is a synergistic effect between the fibre, lignans and omega 3 acids contained in the flax seed, all three of which are known to reduce blood pressure to some degree on their own.
Another key question is whether flax boosted the efficacy of the anti-hypertension drugs the patients were on or if it lowered blood pressure on its own.
“My gut feeling on this is it’s working independently,” said Pierce.
He added that 50 million Americans and another six million Canadians have been diagnosed with hypertension.
The number jumps globally to one billion, many of whom are living in developing countries where blood pressure medicine is expensive. Eating flax would be a low-cost, low-risk alternative.
Hill said the study will bolster the flax industry’s attempt to receive a health claim in Canada and the United States.
It may also help end a trade barrier with the European Union, which won’t accept flax shipments from Canada containing more than .01 percent of Triffid, the deregistered GM flax variety that decimated sales to the EU.
“People look at this (study) and say, ‘if flax is so healthy, why are we worried about this .01 percent of a GMO event from 20 years ago that is hardly detectable?’ ” he said.
