Cooking with shea butter is associated with lower blood pressure in the Ghanaian population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cardiovascular health benefits of shea butter, an edible off-white or ivory-colored fat native to West Africans has never been investigated. This is in spite of anecdotal evidence, which suggests that shea butter may have medicinal properties and its bioactive constituents lower certain cardiovascular risk markers. We hypothesized that cooking with shea butter would be associated with lower blood pressure (BP) in the Ghanaian population. Data from the 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, a nationally representative population-based survey was analyzed. A total of 9396 women aged 15-49 years and 4388 men aged 15-59 years selected from 12,831 sampled households were included in the study. Respondents with average systolic BP of ≥140 mmHg or average diastolic BP of ≥90 mmHg were classified as hypertensive. Multivariable linear and logistic regression adjusting for gender, age, area of residence, religion, ethnic group, marital status, education and wealth index was used to establish the association between shea butter consumption and BP. Overall prevalence of hypertension in the population was 15.1%. Shea butter consumption was associated with 2.43 mmHg (95% CI: -3.54, -1.31) and 1.78 mmHg (95% CI: -2.71, -0.86) decrease in systolic BP and diastolic BP, respectively, and 25% (AOR = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.55, 1.04) reduced odds of hypertension, compared to use of vegetable oils. Region of residence appeared to modify the relationship. We found an association of shea butter consumption with lower BP, which provides the rationale for investigation through rigorous study designs to evaluate the benefits of shea butter consumption for prevention of hypertension and improved cardiovascular health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".