Chicken Soup: Can It Really Lower Blood Pressure?

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A new study came out this week that suggests chicken soup can lower blood pressure. This sounds like good news, right? After all, chicken soup makes you feel warm and cozy—just like the grandmas who dish it out.

But it also sounds too good to be true. Isn’t chicken soup typically loaded with salt, which is notorious for raising blood pressure in some people? I decided to investigate.

I read the study, which was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The study’s authors were Al Saiga and his colleagues at Nippon Meat Packers Inc., of Ibaraki, Japan.

Guess what? The word soup isn’t mentioned once in the study. That’s because the researchers didn’t actually study the homey broth loved by kids around the world.

They studied chicken collagen hydrolysate, a conglomerate of proteins extracted from the tough, yellow tissue found in chicken legs. This stuff is hard to make into food products, due to its “yellow color and unique smell,” the study says.

The researchers digested the collagen with enzymes and then “decolorized and deodorized” it.

Laboratory tests showed that four of the peptides—short proteins found in collagen—had activity similar to ACE inhibitors, a type of medication that lowers blood pressure. When the peptides were fed to rats that normally develop hypertension, they lowered the rodents’ blood pressure six hours later and helped keep the pressure down over a two-week period.

That all sounds great. But it doesn’t mean that slurping down a can of Progresso is going to lower my blood pressure.

To be fair, news stories did mention that it’s the chicken collagen that’s beneficial, not soup, per se. (And they cautioned about salt content too.) But the headlines may lead you to believe otherwise.

I don’t think we need to demonstrate that chicken soup has some sort of anti-inflammatory or cold-fighting value, or that it will treat our collective hypertension. Isn’t it enough that it tastes good and makes us feel better?