Can high-fat diets cause blood pressure levels to rise in young adults?
| Jan 8, 2019, 15:58 IST
It's a given that diets high in fat content can be bad for the body but new research suggests that there's even more to it. Scientists have now found that exactly how harmful a high-fat diet may be can actually differ between sexes. They assumed that high-fat diets would fare worse on males than on females but their research on rats showed that in just four weeks of consuming a high-fat diet, rats from both sexes experienced comparable increases in blood pressure.
"You have a lot of people consuming high-fat diets and we don't know enough about what effect it's having on females," says Dr. Jennifer C. Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. "Since women are more likely to be obese than men and the association between increases in body weight and blood pressure is stronger in women, we wanted to see if the same response occurs in the female as well," says Sullivan.
"To me it really highlights the importance of understanding what you are eating," says Sullivan. "I think we may be underestimating how bad a consistently high-fat diet is for us." They found that even when eating less while on a high-fat diet, male rats put on more weight as compared to female rats. And female rats ended up with an increased level of triglycerides, a type of fat considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Well, if the research is correct, it proves that high-fat diets can have unexpected results on your health, which is why it's best you try and avoid them.
"You have a lot of people consuming high-fat diets and we don't know enough about what effect it's having on females," says Dr. Jennifer C. Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. "Since women are more likely to be obese than men and the association between increases in body weight and blood pressure is stronger in women, we wanted to see if the same response occurs in the female as well," says Sullivan.
"To me it really highlights the importance of understanding what you are eating," says Sullivan. "I think we may be underestimating how bad a consistently high-fat diet is for us." They found that even when eating less while on a high-fat diet, male rats put on more weight as compared to female rats. And female rats ended up with an increased level of triglycerides, a type of fat considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Well, if the research is correct, it proves that high-fat diets can have unexpected results on your health, which is why it's best you try and avoid them.