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A Threat to Your Heart
It's fairly easy to imagine how a diet that's rough on your blood sugar can contribute to weight gain. It's a little harder to understand how it can also contribute to a heart attack -- yet it can. It can lead to clogged arteries and higher blood pressure, and it can raise the level of inflammation in the body, which doctors now know is intimately connected with heart attack risk.High blood sugar produces unstable forms of oxygen called free radicals. These nasty molecules damage the arteries, making it harder for blood vessels to do their job of keeping blood pressure normal and making cholesterol more likely to stick like glue to artery walls.
The high levels of insulin that your body needs to tame all this blood sugar are pretty nasty, too.
They can set in motion changes that raise blood pressure, make blood more likely to form heart-threatening clots, and increase inflammation -- all of which raise your heart disease risk. Over time, meals that cause blood sugar to spike also tend to lower “good" HDL cholesterol and raise triglycerides, fats that are toxic to cells, increasing the risk of heart disease -- and of sudden cardiac arrest.
Big major studies have shown how powerful these damaging effects can be to the heart. In a study of more than 43,000 men age 40 and older, those whose diets boosted blood sugar the most were 37 percent more likely to develop heart disease in the following 6 years. In the Nurses' Health Study of more than 75,000 middle-aged women, those whose diets boosted blood sugar the most were twice as likely to develop heart disease over 10 years. For overweight women, such a diet was even more threatening. For instance, their triglycerides were 144 percent higher than those of women who ate a healthier diet, compared to 40 percent higher for women who weren't overweight.
Fortunately, the phenomenon works in reverse, too: The kinder your meals are to your blood sugar, the kinder they'll be to your heart. Several studies have found that people who ate the fewest blood sugar–boosting foods had higher levels of HDL cholesterol, lower triglycerides, and fewer heart attacks.
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