Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that elevated blood pressure is one of the major risk factors for stroke and coronary heart disease (CHD). A close association between blood pressure and the incidence of cardiovascular diseases is well established if systolic/diastolic blood pressure is above 140/90 mmHg. In recent years, nutraceuticals and functional foods have attracted considerable interest as potential alternative therapies for treatment of hypertension, especially for prehypertensive patients, whose blood pressure is marginally or mildly high but not high enough to warrant the prescription of blood pressure-lowering medications. This review summarizes the findings of recent studies on the chemistry, production, application, efficacy, and mechanisms of popular blood pressure-lowering nutraceuticals and functional foods including the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet plan, L-arginine, chlorogenic acid, fermented milk, garlic, onion, tea, soybean, ginger, hawthorn, and fish oil.

A coupling system between Gaussian type-microwave photon flux, static magnetic field and fractal membranes (or other equivalent microwave lenses) can be used to detect high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) in the microwave band. We study the signal photon flux, background photon flux and the requisite minimal accumulation time of the signal in the coupling system. Unlike pure inverse Gertsenshtein effect (G-effect) caused by the HFGWs in the GHz band, the the electromagnetic (EM) detecting scheme (EDS) proposed by China and the US HFGW groups is based on the composite effect of the synchro-resonance effect and the inverse G-effect. Key parameters in the scheme include first-order perturbative photon flux (PPF) and not the second-order PPF; the distinguishable signal is the transverse first-order PPF and not the longitudinal PPF; the photon flux focused by the fractal membranes or other equivalent microwave lenses is not only the transverse first-order PPF but the total transverse photon flux, and these photon fluxes have different signal-to-noise ratios at the different receiving surfaces. Theoretical analysis and numerical estimation show that the requisite minimal accumulation time of the signal at the special receiving surfaces and in the background noise fluctuation would be ∼ 10 3 − 10 5 seconds for the typical laboratory condition and parameters of h r.m.s. ∼ 10 −26 − 10 −30 at 5GHz with bandwidth ∼1Hz. In addition, we review the inverse G-effect in the EM detection of the HFGWs, and it is shown that the EM detecting scheme based only on the pure inverse G-effect in the laboratory condition would not be useful to detect HFGWs in the microwave band. PACS numbers: 04.30Nk, 04.25Nx, 04.30Db, 04.80Nn a

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The fruits of Ziziphus species have been utilized as food as well as crude drugs for their health benefits in China for thousands of years. This paper reported a reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for the simultaneous characterization and quantitation of 11 triterpenic acids in chloroform extracts of jujube fruits by using an evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD) and electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The results showed that the contents of triterpenic acids in the fruits of Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa were higher than those in the fruits of Z. jujuba, especially for the compound pomonic acid. Differences were also found among the different parts of Z. jujuba var. spinosa fruits with the sarcocarp having a higher amount of triterpenic acids than the seed and hard core.