Posted on September 19, 2014 by Jenny Cromack

 

For a long time saturated fat and salt have been attacked by nutritionist and dieticians, blaming both on increases in various health-related diseases. However, as you may be aware, more recently sugar seems to be in the firing line for being a made contributor to things like obesity, heart disease and in the press this weekend it was indicated that sugar, not salt, maybe the main cause of high blood pressure.

We have written various blogs before about the perils of sugar, back in November 2012 we penned an article about the hidden sugars in food and in September 2013 Chris wrote a blog about reducing sugar in your diet. This blog will look at how sugar can cause high blood pressure.

Quite simply researchers believe that sugar causes high blood pressure due to two reasons:

– High sugar levels affect the hypothalamus in the brain, this in turn causes the heart rate to increase and blood pressure to rise.

– High sugar levels increase the amount of insulin produced by the body which may also speed up the heart rate.

If you do this day after day, ultimately you are continually putting the heart and blood vessels under unnecessary extra strain which in turn causes an increase in high blood pressure.

It also goes without saying that consuming a diet high in sugar is highly likely to cause an increase in your weight. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that weight gain places extra strain and stress on the body which may result in high blood pressure and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

As personal trainers our philosophy is if you eat as clean and lean as possible and keep an eye on your fruit intake and you should pretty much consume healthy levels of sugar, fat and salt without having to worry about reading food labels or keeping a mental log of how many grams of salt or sugar you have eaten that day.

New guidelines suggest we should only consume 5-7 teaspoons of sugar per day, if you think that a can of cola contains 8 teaspoons then it shows how little this really is. If you also think you can get away with using sweeteners instead then take a read of Chris’ recent article first as this may not be the best thing to do.