People consider salt to be the most evil among food flavorings and one of the main culprit for unhealthy heart and hypertension. The question now is: Which is the real evil between sugar and salt?
There is no doubt that both are not healthy. But science claims that salt is not worse than sugar. Actually sugar is more harmful as it increases the negative effects of salt.
Time to Cut Your Sugar Intake
The researchers from St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute together with health experts from Montefiore Medical Center made a research on whether salt or sugar is the real enemy.
They run some tests on animals and humans and the effect of sugar on their health. They concluded the following:
Due to the negative effect of various types of sugar in the body, they found that fructose is extremely harmful when it comes to our health.
Fructose causes heart problems and high blood pressure.
The experts discovered that fructose harms the heart and cause hypertension more than salt.
They also found that lowering your salt intake may actually harm your health.
This discovery is quite shocking as for many years we were told to reduce the salt intake. The reason behind this discovery is that reduced salt intake will cause cravings for more food- especially if salt is consumed through processed food.
How to Decrease Your Sugar Intake
It is more important to reduce sugar intake, especially the one found in sweetened beverages. So stop consuming sodas which contain a lot of artificial sugar. Other rich sources of sugar are:
- Cakes
- Ketchup
- Biscuits
- Yogurt
- Beer
Vegetables and fruits also contain sugar especially fructose, but experts think that naturally occurring sugars are not harmful. Sugar increases the insulin level which may cause activation of sympathetic nervous system. This will accelerate the heart rate, increase blood pressure and constrict your blood vessels. Although we have concluded that we must reduce sugar intake there are still many health experts who say that you should also reduce salt intake. To be safe, the allowed daily doses for sugar and salt are 1.6g and 25g respectively.
Source: http://www.stethnews.com
