People with high blood pressure are told they have a problem with salt – but doctors should really point them to another white crystal, sugar, experts say today.
The doctors say that sugar added to processed foods is probably responsible for more heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure than salt.
Writing in the journal Open Heart, they claim the benefits of centring advice on salt are “debatable” because it achieves relatively small reductions in blood pressure.
And it may be harmful to have a diet without salt – sodium chloride, they add.
In contrast teenagers in the UK and the USA may be consuming up to 16 times the recommended limit of sugar.
The experts allege that sugar sweetened drinks are involved in 180,000 deaths a year worldwide. In the USA people consume the equivalent of 24 or more teaspoons of sugar a day, they say.
High fructose corn syrup, a widely used commercial sweetener, is a particular hazard, they say.
Dr James DiNicolantonio, of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, writes: “Sugar may be much more meaningfully related to blood pressure than sodium, as suggested by a greater magnitude of effect with dietary manipulation.
“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 wrong white crystals: not salt but sugar as aetiological in hypertension and cardiometabolic disease. Open Heart 11 December 2014; doi 10.1136/openhrt-2014-000167 [abstract]
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