A high-protein meal does not improve blood pressure or vasoactive biomarker responses to acute exercise in humans

Blood pressure (BP) responses to exercise yield prognostic information beyond resting BP. While habitual higher dietary protein intake is associated with reduced resting BP, few studies have assessed the impact of high-protein meals on acute BP and vasoactive biomarker responses to exercise. To test the hypothesis that consuming a higher-protein, lower fat meal (HP; 30 g protein, 17 g fat, 52 g carbohydrate) would attenuate the BP response to exercise and result in a more robust post-exercise hypotensive response compared to a lower-protein, higher-fat meal (LP; 13 g protein, 25 g fat, 54 g carbohydrate), we recruited 31 pre-hypertensive subjects to complete this randomized, double-blind, cross-over acute feeding study. One hundred sixty-five minutes after consuming the test HP or LP meal, subjects exercised on a cycle ergometer at 70% VO₂ max for 30 minutes. Blood pressure was measured prior to the meal and periodically before, during, and after exercise for a 315-minute period. Blood samples were periodically collected to quantify plasma arginine, arginine metabolites (asymmetric dimethylarginine, symmetric dimethylarginine; ADMA, SDMA), endothelin-1, nitrates, and nitrites in a subset of subjects (n = 15) as shown in Supplemental Table S1. Consuming the HP meal did not influence the BP responses to exercise, including the post-exercise return to baseline BP or systolic BP area under the curve. While the HP meal resulted in greater postprandial plasma arginine concentrations, ADMA, SDMA, endothelin-1, nitrates, and nitrites were unaltered. These results suggest that consuming a higher-protein, lower-fat meal does not influence BP or vasoactive biomarker responses to exercise compared to a lower-protein, higher-fat meal.