Porter Hospital Blog

Preventing High Blood Pressure by Limiting Sugar
Before you pick up that next soda – with or without sugar – you may want to listen to studies presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting in late October. The studies are showing correlations between health issues such as high blood pressure and our intake of sugar. Equally concerning, another study linked health risks to our kidneys with diet sodas.

Just two sugary sodas a day can affect your blood pressure. While we’ve heard for years that high blood pressure has a correlation with too much dietary salt, a new study shows that sugar may be a culprit as well.
Researchers from the University of Colorado did a dietary history on people to determine how much of a sugar called fructose the patients were consuming. This sugar, fructose, is found in processed foods, juices and other sweet treats and is the equivalent of 2.5 sugary sodas a day. The researchers found that patients who were taking in 74 grams or more of fructose per day were much more likely to have high blood pressure. The higher the blood pressure, the greater the association with the sugar intake – 87% greater risk of having a blood pressure of 160/100 compared to those with lower sugar intake.
Does that mean that cutting back on sugar could cure high blood pressure?
The researchers did not set up their study to determine if low sugar intake improves high blood pressure, but the study would suggest that taking in less fructose – the sugar found in corn syrup, would be a very good idea to prevent high blood pressure. And decreasing sugar if you have high blood pressure certainly cannot hurt

So, the obvious question for those of us who like sodas is – should we just all switch to diet drinks?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Another study published at the Nephrology meeting linked high intake of diet sodas with an increased risk of decreased renal function – or put in non-medical language – the kidneys losing some of their function more quickly than normal aging. The study looked at the intake of both sugary sodas and artificially sweetened, or diet, soda intake in a group of women in the Nurses Health study – a huge study that has followed the health of nurses for the past 11 years. The study showed that 2 servings of diet soda or more per day was associated with a two fold increase in the risk of more rapid decline of kidney function. This correlation was there even after the known factors for kidney function decline were mathematically factored out.

So, why would diet soda intake increase the decline in kidney function? Unfortuntately, the authors did not have a reason as to why the diet sodas would be associated with a decline in kidney function. We should be expecting more research in this area.

Take-aways for our health:

1) limit soda intake for you and your family to less than 2 sodas a day
2) drink more water
3) keep sugar from other sources below 74 grams per day
4) both your kidneys and your blood pressure benefit from limiting salt intake
5) Monitor your blood pressure – it should be 120/80 or less