Grana Padang PDO: Not Only Tasty, But Healthy

Mila Tenaglia (July 20, 2016)

We met Doctor Crippa at Eataly during the Grana Padano Cheese Health presentation in which he explained to us the research he has conducted over the last two years on this type of cheese. The results are remarkable, revealing that blood pressure can be notably reduced. Don’t you believe us? Read on to believe it.

The saying goes that ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’. But what if we said that the same applies for the dietary supplementation of 1 ounce of Grana Padano cheese? These findings are confirmed by Dr. Giuseppe Crippa, who recently came to New York to present his study to the scientific community during a conference held by the American Society of Hypertension and at Eataly “for non-experts”.

“In most Italian regions, Grana Padano cheese is part of an habitual diet and is widely
available throughout the country.

We applied the scientific methods that are used to evaluate the effects of antihypertensive drugs to this trial, supplementing 1 ounce of Grana Padano or a placebo to the diet of patients with arterial hypertension each day for 2 months”.

In other words, Grana Padano cheese contains some ‘tripeptides’—protein fragments that form during the aging of the cheese—that act with the same mechanism of action as some antihypertensive drugs, such as ramipril, lisinopril and captopril, for example.

The study began in 2013 in Piacenza, in the Unit of Hypertension at the Guglielmo da Saliceto Hospital. The research was carried out after another pilot study that produced the same results as those that Dr. Crippa’s team has obtained today. The only difference is that the placebo wasn’t used.

According to his results—obtained under strict investigational measures—the supplement significantly reduces blood pressure in hypertensive patients whose blood pressure is slightly higher than normal. Paradoxically, the study is more significant in the United States than in Italy. “Americans are very attentive to this type of research” Dr. Crippa tells us, “I received a lot of offers to present my work in the United States and I will present it again in Seoul, Korea. We also expect to publish it in the biggest magazine on hypertension in the world.”

Naturally the feedback has also been (and still is) extremely good in Italy. If you take a look on the Internet you can see that nearly 900 quotes appeared in the first few days after the publication of the results.”