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A bowl of cereal for breakfast can reduce the risk of developing high blood pressure, a finding that has scientists lined up foursquare behind the benefits of this healthy start to the day.

The study was presented today at the American Heart Association's Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2011 Scientific Sessions. Healthy diets that help manage high blood

pressure typically include cereal, but up to now there have been no guidelines about how many servings people need to reap the benefits. To answer the question, Harvard University

geriatrician Jinesh Kochar, M.D., and his colleagues gathered information from questionnaires filled out by participants in the Physicians' Health Study I, a long-running survey of male

doctors. The researchers collected information from more than 13,000 doctors between the ages of 40 and 86 who did not have high blood pressure when they entered the study. More than 7,000

of them developed the condition during the 16-year study period. The men were divided into four groups according to the amount of breakfast cereal they ate: no cereal, one serving a week or

less, two to six servings a week, and seven or more servings a week. Compared with the group that ate no cereal, the researchers found that the more servings of cereal the men ate, the lower

the chance of developing high blood pressure. "We know that blood pressure rises with age and this interesting research provides us with another way to help control it," says

Penny Kris-Etherton, a Penn State University professor of nutrition who was not involved in the study. "It's not a restrictive message that tells us to, 'Eat less of

....' What it says is, 'Enjoy cereal for breakfast.' " The odds of developing high blood pressure dropped by 7 percent among those who ate one serving a week or less, and

by 12 and 19 percent respectively among the groups having two to six servings and seven or more servings, even after adjusting for other factors such as age, smoking, weight, physical

activity and type 2 diabetes. The men who ate whole grains, such as oatmeal and bran flakes, rather than refined-grain cereal such as corn flakes, fared even better. We know that "whole

grains modify the risk of developing hypertension, which can lead to coronary heart disease, heart attacks, stroke and kidney disease," says lead author Kochar. Eating whole-grain

breakfast cereal, along with other healthy lifestyle measures such as limiting your salt intake and getting enough physical activity, he notes, may reduce the chances of developing high

blood pressure. Moreover, a study of more than half a million AARP members between the ages of 50 and 71 published last month in the _Archives of Internal Medicine_ showed that eating whole

grains seems to lower the risk of death from heart, respiratory and infectious diseases.