• Posted June 17, 2025

Blood Pressure Diet Helps Type 2 Diabetics

TUESDAY, June 17, 2025 (HealthDay News) — A diet meant to lower blood pressure also can be effective in treating type 2 diabetes after a few tweaks, a new clinical trial indicates.

The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet effectively treated high blood pressure among type 2 diabetics, researchers reported recently in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“A lot of people are interested in controlling diabetes and their blood pressure through diet and other lifestyle changes,” said senior researcher Dr. Lawrence Appel, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“Most people in this study were taking more than one blood pressure medication, but we found that you can lower it further with dietary change,” Appel added in a news release. “Blood pressure is one of the most important numbers to control because the higher the number, the higher the risk of stroke and heart disease.”

For this study, researchers developed a new version of the DASH diet they dubbed “DASH4D” — DASH For Diabetes.

The original DASH diet is rich in fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy, while reducing saturated fat and cholesterol intake, researchers said in background notes. Appel helped develop this original version of the diet.

The DASH4D diet maintains those guidelines while also lowering carbohydrates and increasing the intake of unsaturated fats, to help people maintain stable blood sugar levels, researchers said.

The new take on DASH also reduces potassium intake, to help prevent the kidney disease that often accompanies type 2 diabetes, researchers added.

“The DASH diet has been around for a long time, and is part of the standard treatment for hypertension,” lead researcher Dr. Scott Pilla, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a news release.

However, there’s been little study of this diet in people with diabetes, particularly if it’s tweaked to also reduce sodium intake, he said.

For the clinical trial, researchers randomly assigned 85 people to follow one of four diets in random order – the DASH4D diet with lower sodium, DASH4D diet with higher sodium, typical U.S. diet with lower sodium and typical U.S. diet with higher sodium.

About 66% of participants were on two or more high blood pressure meds, researchers said.

The low-sodium DASH4D lowered systolic blood pressure by about 5 points, compared with high-sodium diets, researchers found. Systolic pressure is the top number on a blood pressure reading, and represents the pressure within blood vessels during a heartbeat.

That five-point reduction reduced the risk of stroke by 14%; heart failure by 8%; and heart health events by 6%, results show.

By comparison, taking blood pressure medications typically lowers systolic blood pressure by about 10 points, researchers noted.

“The next steps are to get the knowledge that we gained out to people with diabetes and help them use the diet to make healthy changes,” Pilla said.

“We need to make it easier for people to follow this diet in ways that are affordable and accessible to people of different cultures and with different dietary habits so they can integrate them into their daily life and make them part of their daily routine,” he added.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on the DASH diet.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins Medicine, news release, June 10, 2025