If You Have High Blood Pressure, Check Out the Olive Leaf

Some herbs don’t get the attention they deserve despite an impressive body of research. One of them is olive leaf extract, a powerful herb for high blood pressure.

It’s hard to believe, but 22.6% of Canadian adults have high blood pressure. Harder still to believe is that nearly half of Americans over the age of 20 do. Worse, only 24% of Americans with high blood pressure have it under control.

Impressive research is piling up that olive leaf extract is an effective herb for high blood pressure, even as effective as the drug captopril (Phytomed 2011;18:251-8). Earlier this year, a meta-analysis of 3 studies that included 248 people with hypertension or prehypertension confirmed the power of olive leaf extract to lower blood pressure. When the dose was 1000mg a day, olive leaf extract lowered systolic blood pressure by 11.45 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure by 4.65 mmHg (Phytother Res. May 2025;39(6):2863-74).

Future meta-analyses will have to add one more. A just-published double-blind study of 621 people with high blood pressure found that taking olive leaf extract for 12 weeks reduced 24-hour blood pressure significantly better than placebo.

Systolic blood pressure dropped by 6.4 mmHg compared to only 1.5 mmHg in the placebo group. Both systolic and diastolic blood pressure load decreased significantly more in the olive leaf extract group. Blood pressure load is the percentage of readings in a 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring study that are above the upper normal limit.

The study also found that olive leaf extract was associated with greater improvement in cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, body weight, and C-reactive protein, a marker of systemic inflammation.

Better still, the olive leaf extract was safe with no significant adverse events.

This study adds to the growing body of research establishing olive leaf extract as an important herbal treatment for high blood pressure.

J Hypertens. 2025 Nov 1;43(11):1878-1884.

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