Chicken soup may help lower blood pressure

OSAKA , Japan, April 3 (UPI) -- Chicken soup with matzo balls, a popular home remedy for the common cold, may help control blood pressure, Japanese researchers suggest.

Ai Saiga and colleagues cite previous studies indicating that chicken breast contains collagen proteins with effects similar to ACE inhibitors -- mainstay medications for treating high blood pressure.

However, chicken breast contains such small amounts of the proteins that it could not be used to develop food and medical products for high blood pressure.

The researchers say chicken legs and feet, often discarded as waste products in the United States, are key soup ingredients elsewhere and appear to be a better source.

In the study, Saiga and colleagues extracted collagen from chicken legs and tested its ability to act as an ACE inhibitor in the laboratory studies. They identified four different proteins in the collagen mixture with high ACE-inhibitory activity.

The study, scheduled to be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, finds that, given to rats used to model human high blood pressure, the proteins produced a significant and prolonged decrease in blood pressure.