A Sweet Heartbreak

Let's talk about a paradigm-shaking study that was published in 2014 that implicated sugar as the most significant risk-factor in heart disease.  It showed that of the 40,000 people who were evaluated the ones who consumed the most sugar were 400% more likely to have a heart attack than those who consumed the least amount of sugar.  The publication went on to recognize that other significant and high-quality studies had already shown that sugar consumption raised the risk of obesity, type-2 diabetes, higher cholesterol, high blood pressure and you guessed it...cardiovascular disease.

What a game-changer! Sugar! Imagine that a substance that the FDA still recognizes as “Generally Regarded As Safe” is THE MAJOR risk factor of heart disease!  

Let’s dig a little deeper into how sugar leads to heart disease so that this can make more sense to you.  Hang in there with me for a moment while I break down the chain of events that start with the consumption of sugar and end with cardiovascular disease.

You see quickly after consuming sugar, your blood glucose levels begin to rise.  This is what triggers your pancreas to release the hormone known as insulin. Insulin’s job is to drive the extra blood sugar into your cells where it is stored for energy.  This process is how blood sugar is restored to a normal level.  The problem is, that when your cells already have enough sugar stored, the excess is not allowed in and therefore blood sugar remains high.  This triggers the pancreas to release even more insulin in an attempt to drive sugar into already sugar-saturated cells.  This excess insulin starts to change the sensitivity of how your cells respond to it and they start “pushing back” leading to a condition known as Insulin Resistance or what i like to call Metabolic Syndrome.  The blood sugar that remains high begins converting into fat and Wala we have the root cause of Obesity now explained.  

Here is where the rubber meets the road though when it comes to damage to the cardiovascular system.  You see, when sugar is high in the blood it combines with other proteins and begins striking and injuring the blood vessel walls causing long-term damage.  In response to this damage, the body tries to patch the walls of your blood vessels with a waxy cholesterol-laden plaque which leads to a process you've certainly heard of before known as atherosclerosis.  And of course, as you already know, this narrowing of the arteries leads to high blood pressure, heart attacks and even strokes.

Needless to say, sugar is heart killer and should be avoided as such. 

Now that we have identified the major dietary contributor to heart disease, in our next episode I will further put the cholesterol/fat myth into perspective.