Do Soft Drinks Cause High Blood Pressure?
How many carbonated soft drinks would you have to drink daily to increase your risk of high blood pressure?
Fructose as an added sugar seems to raise the risk of high blood pressure. High blood pressure, in turn, causes heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, heart failure, and kidney failure. Most soft drinks are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.
So how many soft drinks does it take to increase your risk of high blood pressure? Find out at my recent Self-NutritionData Heart Health blog post, just a quick click away.
August 5th, 2010 at 7:59 am
How is fructose as an added sugar different than the naturally occurring fructose in fruit? I’ve spent a little bit of time looking into it this morning and I can’t seem to get a straight answer.
August 5th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Hi, Nick.
Soft drinks (and many commercial fruit juices for that matter) contain a lot more fructose per serving compared to fresh fruit. That’s the main difference.
For instance, a can of carbonated soft drink contains the equivalent of something like 12-16 teaspoons of table sugar (table sugar is sucrose, which is 50:50 fructose and glucose). The manufacturers of soft drinks switched from sucrose to high fructose corn syrup years ago, because it’s cheaper.
August 5th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Thanks.