Response to “Yogurt Intake and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Among Hypertensive Individuals: Is It Time for a Clinical Trial?”

To the Editor: We thank Elias et al. for their letter to the editor regarding our recent publication, "Yogurt intake and risk of cardiovascular disease among hypertensive individuals."¹ The authors raised several interesting points that we would like to address. With respect to the absence of a "reference group" of nonhypertensive individuals, we emphasize that we purposefully selected those with prevalent high blood pressure (HBP) for inclusion in this study for two reasons—first, to ensure greater comparability between regular yogurt consumers and nonconsumers (our internal referent group), and, second, because the mechanisms by which yogurt may impact cardiovascular disease risk may well extend beyond blood pressure control. We designed this analysis to address an important gap in the scientific literature since no previous studies had evaluated the relative incidence of cardiovascular disease associated with the level of yogurt consumption among those with prevalent HBP.

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