A plant-based diet appears to afford significant protection to rats bred to become hypertensive on a high-salt diet, scientists report. When the rats become pregnant, the whole grain diet also protects the mothers and their offspring from deadly preeclampsia. Although we have all heard to avoid the salt shaker, an estimated 30-50% of us have a significant increase in blood pressure in response to high-salt intake, percentages that are even higher and more impactful in Blacks.
Young pregnant women, who appear to have fully recovered from an acute injury that reduced their kidney function, have higher rates of significant problems like preeclampsia and low birthweight babies, problems which indicate their kidneys have not actually fully recovered. Now scientists have developed a rodent model that is enabling studies to better understand, identify and ideally avoid this recently identified association, they report in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
