A study of the elderly in Bible belt North Carolina has found that a daily dose of the Bible and a weekly stroll to the church can lower your blood pressure...as long as you steer clear of radio and tele-evangelists.

Listening to them can send your pulse soaring.

The Good News for the spiritually-minded comes from a six-year study of over 2,000 elderly people living in an overwhelmingly Protestant area.

Faith and fitness

The research is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and is published in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine.

It found that people who attended a religious service at least once a week and prayed or studied the Bible once a day were 40% less likely to have diastolic blood pressure of 90 or higher.

That is the level most commonly associated with a greater risk of heart attacks and strokes.

African-Americans and the younger elderly - those under 74 - had the strongest links between religious faith and blood pressure levels.

Very religious

The researchers caution that their subjects were perhaps more zealous than the average church-goer.

Fifty-three per cent of the guinea pigs went to church at least once a week and 56% prayed daily or more often.

Seventy-five percent watched religious programmes on TV or listened to them on the radio at least once week.

But Harold Koenig, one of the researchers, said: "This was a large and clinically significant difference. One of the largest effects thus far identified on cardiovascular health."

They also admitted that the difference in blood pressure rates was not that high, but said even slight decreases could make a big impact on health.