DASH: A Meal Pattern Like a Puzzle

1. What Is It Actually?

DASH is not a substance that you can put into a bottle. DASH is a way of eating. Researchers call something like this a dietary pattern. You cannot buy it. You put it together from foods.

Imagine a puzzle. Each piece is a food: vegetables, fruit, wholemeal bread, nuts, beans, fish. Other pieces appear less often, for example salty snacks, sweet drinks and fatty meat. Only together do they form a picture.

A pattern is like a melody. A single note says little. Only the sequence makes music out of it. It is the same with eating: Not a single food is at the centre, but the mixture over many days.

In the studies the English name stands as „Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension“. In German that means roughly: Ways through nutrition to tackle high blood pressure. Blood pressure is the pressure with which your heart pumps the blood through your body. If you put your hand on your neck after running, you feel your pulse. Blood pressure works similarly, only much more quietly.

2. Where Does It Come From?

The name DASH comes from English. You will not find it on a packet in the supermarket, because DASH is not a product. It is a combination of foods that arises in the kitchen.

The idea behind it comes from research. Researchers wanted to know whether the way of eating influences blood pressure. In the studies it was first about adults, some with high blood pressure, some without. Later researchers also looked at young people whose blood pressure was raised.

DASH belongs to no one. There is no company that produces it, and no box that you can open. Every family can build its own pattern from it, with what comes to the table at home.

3. What Do the Researchers Investigate?

Researchers look at DASH from many directions. In the large review articles it is mainly about blood pressure: in adults with high blood pressure and in adults without. Other studies investigate what changes in the blood after this way of eating. Others look at how people with a chronic illness get on with it, or whether older people with memory problems notice something. One study even dealt with the gums.

What do they already know? That an entire eating pattern can be investigated at all, and that researchers describe it similarly again and again.

What is still open? Quite a lot. For example: Does the pattern work as a whole, or are only individual parts important? Why do some people react differently from others? And what happens in the body step by step? Such questions are still open, and researchers are working on them.

4. An Experiment for Thinking

Sit down at the next meal and look at your plate before you start. Count the colours. How many different ones do you see?

Now imagine everything on the plate had the same colour. Everything would be white. Would you notice that something is missing? Probably yes.

That is the idea behind DASH: A plate with many different things looks different from a plate with only one thing. You do not have to rearrange anything and you do not have to weigh anything. Just look and think about which parts of your puzzle were there today.

For adults and professionals: the detailed page on the DASH diet.