Yes, sugar tastes great!
Adding sugar to your food can make it sweeter and tastier. Even sweet treats are delicious, but consuming too much sugar is not healthy, especially for your heart. Not just obese people, but even others are at risk of developing heart disease due to increased sugar consumption. Hence, limiting your sugar intake is the best way to ensure heart health.
Why Eating Too Much Sugar Increases the Risks of Heart Disease
Sugar Increases Your Blood Pressure – Yes, sugar may be worse for your blood pressure than salt. Many studies state that a high-sucrose diet has the potential to cause both systolic and diastolic blood pressure to skyrocket. Moreover, each sugary beverage you consume increases your chances of having heart disease to a great extent. Simply put, increased sugar levels can cause sodium to accumulate within a cell, leading to a build-up of calcium, resulting in vasoconstriction and hypotension.
Tooth Decay Due to Sugar Can Hurt Your Heart – It is well known that eating too much sugar can cause tooth decay, but you may not be aware that tooth decay can also lead to heart disease. There is enough evidence linking tooth decay to cardiovascular disease. Therefore, dentists and cardiologists recommend reducing sugar consumption and regular dental check-ups and cleanings to combat this risk. It has been observed that individuals with gum disease have thicker blood vessels in their necks and that constant low-level infections can negatively affect the heart.
Sugar Can Hurt Your Cholesterol Levels – Medical studies suggest that eating too much sugar can mess with your blood lipid levels. When compared to people who eat only small amounts of sugar, adults who consume larger amounts of sugar are more likely to possess low HDL (“good”) cholesterol – in the body and higher LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels. Eating more sugar is also linked with elevated triglyceride levels (a type of blood fat associated with cardiovascular disease).
Too Much Sugar Strains the Heart – Over the past years, we have increased our calorie intake just by consuming more carbohydrates and sugars. Due to these excess calorie we often put on extra weight that causes damage to our hearts. And a lot of this damage can occur long even before a heart attack.
How to Reduce Sugar Consumption?
Nowadays, the problem with various foods is that sugar is often hidden. With many different names for this ingredient, it’s not surprising that it’s often overlooked. Sugar is concealed in several processed foods, condiments, sauces, yogurt, bread, etc. Hence, it’s easy for us to eat more sugar than we intend to. So it is of utmost importance to look at the ingredient labels very carefully.
Today, we are flooded with advertisements and sugary temptations, and it can be hard to turn down tasty treats. However, sugary treats aren’t something to avoid forever, but controlling their intake is the key to staying healthy. Something, your heart will thank you for it.
