Who are the three highest?
In terms of the urgency of taking medication, there is no doubt that high blood pressure is the highest of the three in need of immediate treatment. There are many causes of high blood pressure. Is blood sugar one of them?
• A meta-analysis of 12 studies of more than 400,000 participants reported that sugary drinks significantly increased blood pressure. More specifically, drinking more than 12 ounces of sugary drinks a day increases the risk of high blood pressure by at least 6 percent and increases systolic blood pressure by at least 1.8 mmHg after a year and a half.
• Another integrated study showed that intake of foods high in sugar (sucrose accounting for one-third of calories) for more than 8 weeks significantly increased systolic (6.9 mmHg) and diastolic (5.6 mmHg) blood pressure. If sugar-sponsored studies were excluded from the integration study, the increase in blood pressure was even more significant, with systolic blood pressure increasing by 7.6 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure by 6.1 mmHg.
• We all know that chronic high blood sugar can lead to insulin resistance (more on this below). It is not difficult to understand that some studies have pointed out that about 50%-80% of hypertensive patients have hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance. In contrast, only 10 to 25 percent of people with normal blood pressure have hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance.
Hyperglycemia is also clearly upstream of hypertension in the course of disease progression. Based on the above discussion, hyperglycemia can cause hyperlipidemia and hypertension. Obviously, the first of the three high is high blood sugar. In this case, the effect of high blood sugar on the cardiovascular system is conceivable.
A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that every 1 percent increase in glycosylated hemoglobin increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by 18 percent, independent of known cardiovascular risk factors. Compared with those who consumed less than 10 per cent of total calories a day from sucrose, those who consumed between 10 and 24.9 per cent of total calories a day had a 30 per cent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
The risk was almost threefold if sucrose was more than 25 per cent of total calories. Why is high blood sugar such a big risk for cardiovascular disease? Scientists have come up with many explanations, but the most thought-provoking one is “glycemic Memory”, proposed by Australian scientists in 2012. Basically, hyperglycemia continuously increases the production of oxygen free radicals, causing inflammation of blood vessels and apoptosis of vascular endothelial cells. So even when blood sugar returns to normal, these cascade of reactions continue, hence the name blood sugar memory.
The impact of blood sugar on cardiovascular disease cannot be ignored, because the Ministry of Health and Welfare has released statistics on the causes of death of Chinese people in 2018. The second cause is heart disease, the fourth is cerebrovascular disease and the eighth is hypertensive disease. Combined, these cardiovascular diseases account for about one in every four deaths.
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