To understand the link between sugar and cardiovascular disease, it’s helpful to understand what’s happening inside the body when you get too much sugar through your diet.
Blood Vessel Issues
Consistently eating a high amount of processed sugar can damage the lining of your blood vessels over time.
“Excess sugar can be associated with the promotion of accelerated atherosclerosis (plaque buildup inside the walls of the blood vessel),” Cork says. “Which can ultimately cause narrowing of critically important arteries providing blood flow to the heart, brain, extremities, or other organs.”
Insulin Resistance
“Whenever we have excess sugar floating around in our bloodstream, our body responds to that by releasing insulin,” explains Matthew Landry, PhD, RDN, a member of the American Heart Association (AHA) Nutrition Committee and assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine.
When your body is constantly having to use insulin to bring your blood sugar down, you can develop insulin resistance. “That’s a key risk factor for type 2 diabetes,” Dr. Landry says.
Inflammation
“There’s some more emerging evidence showing that having that excess sugar can increase systemic inflammation throughout the body,” Landy says.
“Increased sugar levels have been shown to be associated with the development of obesity, which is an inflammatory state,” Cork says. “Some studies have shown obesity to be associated with increased risk of congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease event rates.”
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