Is sugar worse for your heart health than sodium?
Maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise, we know, is the best way to fight cardiovascular disease and its risk factor high blood pressure. Consuming both excess sodium and sugar have long been known to play a role in increasing people's risk for heart disease, but a recent study published in the British Medical Journal indicates that dietary guidelines for those at risk for heart disease should focus more on the amount of added sugars, particularly fructose that comes from processed foods and artificially sweetened beverages in a person's diet.
"Sugar may be much more meaningfully related to blood pressure than sodium, as suggested by a greater magnitude of effect with dietary manipulation," the study's research team said according to Medical Daily. "Compelling evidence from basic science, population studies, and clinical trials implicates sugars, and particularly the monosaccharide fructose, as playing a major role in the development of hypertension (high blood pressure)."
The researchers, James DiNicolantonio of Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City and Sean Lucan of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx argue in their paper that restricting sodium in our diets will only lead to small decrease in blood pressure. They believe that reducing added sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup that is found in many processed foods and drinks will have a bigger impact on your heart health. Did you know that a diet where a quarter of your daily calories come from added sugars can triple your risk for heart disease?
DiNicolantonio and Lucan explained that sugar sweetened beverage consumption like soda has been linked to about 180,000 deaths a year worldwide.
"Just as most dietary sodium does not come from the salt shaker, most dietary sugar does not come from the sugar bowl; reducing consumption of added sugars by limiting processed foods containing it, made by corporations, would be a good place to start," they said. "The evidence is clear that even moderate doses of added sugar for short durations may cause substantial harm."
They make a point to clarify though that those natural sugars in fruits and vegetables have not been found to be harmful to our health.