Most replayed moment: Blood pressure: the silent risk you shouldn’t ignore | Prof Tim Spector

0:00Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about blood pressure. Most of us know that high blood pressure is bad, but surprisingly few of us understand what it actually means, how widely it affects the body, or how to keep it under control. The good news is that monitoring blood pressure is easier than ever, putting you in a strong position to spot problems early and take meaningful action. Professor Tim Spector joins me to explain what blood pressure is, why it matters so much, and share some top salt-based tips that can have a powerful impact on long-term health.

0:45I have absolutely no idea what high blood pressure actually is. So what is it? It is basically a hardening of the arteries and thickening of the arteries so they're not as flexible. And these are the arteries, the blood vessels that go all around your body from your heart, pumping blood to every bit of your body, including your brain. And each time your heart beats, there's a change in how much pressure is put into the system. And essentially, it's there to absorb that shock. it's also there to have a system so if you're exercising or you need to run away quickly your blood pressure can go up in in short bursts and that's normal and it comes back again quickly so you want a flexible mobile system and what happens when you have high blood pressure which is also known as hypertension is that it stays up it doesn't just come up and go down your resting level is higher so you've got more resistance to the whole system it's like your pipes are furring up a bit they're just not as flexible and bendy and this puts a strain on the rest of your body so it has to sort of work harder to do things that's that's a very simple way of thinking about it and where we draw the line about it being normal abnormal is a bit flexible itself so it could be that if we wanted to have the perfect blood pressure of say indigenous tribes in Africa then we would put our thresholds even lower and maybe two-thirds of us would be counting as having high blood pressure in the west and it's considered a metabolic problem as well so metabolic syndrome which I think we've talked about in the past is a combination of clusters of things that we get in the west where you might get type 2 diabetes you might get obesity you get high cholesterol and a part of that as well as heart disease is high blood pressure and they seem to have similar causes and relationships and they they all lead on to one to the other so if you've got one you're more likely to get the others yes if you have type 2 diabetes you're more likely to have high blood pressure but it also works the other way around as well that if you got this defect in your blood vessels that causes stress to all your cells and the way they're pumping out energy and using fuel in all the organs in your body makes you more like to have kidney disease makes you more like have brain disease in terms of dementia and affects all all bits of your body to some extent So it's not just a sudden yes or no, I'm going to get a stroke or not.

3:30It has a really harmful effect on many aspects of your body. It needs to be seen as a metabolic disease rather than as a purely one-off thing on its own. It's a sign that your body's not healthy. So it definitely sounds really serious. It also sounds like lots of people listening on this podcast, when they go and get themselves measured, will discover their blood pressure is higher than they thought it was, higher than this sort of healthy range. If they then reduce their blood pressure, is it too late to fix any of the damage? Or if they reduce their blood pressure, does that reduce the risk of all these diseases in the future, even if it's been high in the past?

4:08It's never too late to reduce your blood pressure. I think that's generally the case, apart from people maybe in their hundreds. For most of us, even if If you've not known about it for 10 years, you'll still get enormous benefit from getting that blood pressure down to that 120 over 80 range, where you will start to see the benefits and your metabolism, your body will improve. The inflammation will improve. Your risks will suddenly drop of many of these conditions. Some of the damage will be done, but you'll still be protecting your future life in a big way if you take action. So I think you've got to be very positive about this and not think about the past, think about the future and your future years.

4:55And especially, you know, I've seen my mother have a stroke. She had poorly controlled blood pressure. And we all know people like that. And it's such a preventable condition that we really all need to be taking much more care of our blood pressure. So if you don't mind my asking, when you talk about that example with your mother, are you saying that you feel that if she'd managed to control her blood pressure better, she might not have had that stroke? I think that's correct, yes. The data show that if your blood pressure is well controlled, as opposed to poorly controlled, it can halve your risk of having a stroke.

5:31You can never eliminate the chance completely, because sometimes people have stroke without having high blood pressure, but you can dramatically improve the odds. So Tim, I would love to switch now to that actionable advice. Is there anything that people can do in terms of their lifestyle? Absolutely, yes. So lifestyle changes, as we've discussed many times, are important. So if you're too sedentary, that's going to put your blood pressure up. So try and do some exercise. Sedentary is like doctor speak for sitting on the couch and watching TV. Sitting on your bum all the time, yeah, exactly. Modern lifestyle, working at home, very bad for you.

6:10Get out there, do some walking, do some exercise. That's good for blood pressure. Sleeping well is also related to blood pressure. So sort out your sleep as much as you can. That's not just one of these sort of hand wavy things that your sleep really has an impact on your blood pressure. Yes, it does. And again, we see this repeated because blood pressure is part of this metabolic group of conditions that all seem to have similar causes. A poor night's sleep or doing lots of shift work will actually raise your blood pressure. So particularly if you are doing night work, shift work, you are more prone to these problems.

6:46so it is a risk factor generally we did sort of laugh off stress but if you've got chronic stress in your life then that is associated with blood pressure in many studies and try and find ways of reducing that through something you enjoy whether it's sport or it can be something like yoga it can be like meditation it can be through having sauna There have been some small studies showing that people who have regular saunas do have lower blood pressures. So anything that, and it sort of makes sense because you're expanding and you're stretching your blood vessels when you're going for a sauna. They're trying to keep up and keep your temperature constant.

7:34So they're having a little workout. So this is like the gym for my blood vessels is just to sit in a sauna and sweat. Correct. Yes, exactly. I love that. It's definitely less painful than the ice baths. We know that that's not my thing. I know you prefer sauna to ice baths. But the same way, mindfulness and yoga, they do relax you and you will get some benefit from that as well. But I think the main thing we should focus on that everyone can do is to think what in their diet can they do to get their blood pressure down because every millimeter counts. So can we talk a bit more, can we start to dive into diet then maybe start with what might be causing the problem what what in my diet might be raising my blood pressure these would be most likely be processed foods that have high salt content we think that about 85 percent of the salt you you get in the average american or british diet comes from pre-packaged manufactured highly processed foods so almost all the salt does not come from when you pour salt onto your meal.

8:43Unless you live and work in a French restaurant, then it's only about 10 % of your intake. It varies a bit, but it's at most 20%. So at least 80 % is coming from pre-packaged foods that you're buying, whether in canned soups, whether they're in biscuits, they're in muesli, they're in children's cereals, things that you don't expect to find so much salt. And is that more salt than we would have put in our diet, you know, in the past when people would have just been cooking their own versions of these meals? Much more, yeah. It's like three or four times more you're getting. And they're often doing it to disguise some of the other flavors.

9:26Salt is used to disguise a lot of the chemicals that they're putting into these foods. It's also there to provide this hyperpalatability. this is a term we've talked about, make you overeat. So by adding a certain amount of salt to things, if you combine that with salt and fat in these foods, you will naturally overeat and therefore spend more money on that company's product than you would otherwise have done. So this is like a big part of what sort of big food is putting into these meals, either to hide the ingredients that you might taste and don't taste as nice, or just to make you have that thing where you just can't stop eating And it's sort of that sort of magic point where it's so delicious that you're just going to eat the whole pack.

10:09Correct. And it's obviously so vital to their product. They really haven't worked out a way of doing without it. And so it's the number one thing that we should be avoiding. And it's the worst thing is it's in many children's products and things you don't even think are salty. I mean, don't normally think of cookies or biscuits as needing salt in them. and yet there they are with the sugar you've got the salt it's often used to preserve them for even longer shelf lives as well so that's where most of the salt comes from and i don't think there's any harm in telling everybody who's worried about their blood pressure to avoid those kinds of foods because even if it doesn't dramatically reduce your blood pressure if you're you know you're not particularly salt sensitive you get so much other benefits from not having those kinds of foods anyway so i think everyone should should be doing that the second thing you can do is if you do find yourself adding a lot of table salt to your food you're someone who likes that you might want to switch to a different type of salt called potassium chloride so this is sometimes labeled as low salt alternatives so salt has the chemical formula sodium chloride and these low salts are potassium chloride and they basically mix the sodium chloride with potassium chloride to give you a similar taste but much less of the sodium more of potassium and when they've done clinical randomized clinical trials of this they show that if you switch this around and you're you're not having all the other sort of junk foods we talked about you can reduce your blood pressure by about uh three to four percent so more than just reducing salt on its own so that's that's a pretty good tip the only problem is for many people they have a rather metallic taste and they don't don't like it but this is what manufacturers should be doing they should be putting much more potassium than sodium into these pre-packaged foods that would really help that make them less harmful for us the other big thing is is realizing that just by increasing your potassium level you will be improving your blood pressure be reducing it and the best way to improve your your potassium level is to eat more varied plants I'm not into superfoods I don't think people should be eating tons of kiwi fruit necessarily but that's a good example of one that is full of potassium but fruits and vegetables in their natural form are fantastic sources of potassium that we should all be eating more of and less salty things and just change that ratio and the more you do that the more you'll be able to improve your blood pressure naturally you know even before you're going on to blood pressure medications and they can also enhance blood pressure medication so it's not either or i think even if you're on a blood pressure medication the more you can help it with diet the less you need to go on to higher doses or a second one which could give you more side effects etc the better you'll be so you feel like combining this with medication makes sense this isn't something where just popping the medication sort of solves the problem for everybody absolutely yes so i think they should be used together i think we should be seeing diet as another arm of medication not as as a complete alternative only if you you know don't believe in medication because for this particular condition that the evidence is you know so clear that medication will save your life and will stop you're getting a stroke and heart attack.

14:05So I don't want anyone to think that this is instead of, it's usually in addition to, it might mean that you can eventually, you might be able to get off your medications. If you're someone who started them when they're on a really poor junk food diet, your doctor didn't tell you that that reason was you were getting all these terrible blood pressure inducing effects from the food. You've changed that, you've improved your life, you've improved you've got microbes, they're secreting other chemicals, you might then be able to wean yourself off these drugs. That's possible. You certainly heard stories of this from people who've written to me.

14:43So bear that in mind, but do that under medical supervision. Hosting this podcast means I get to quiz world-leading scientists every week about how to improve my health. But I'll be honest with you, for a long time, my snacking habit was completely out of sync with the science. I'd hit an energy slump, grab a snack bar, and usually inhale it in two bites while looking at my phone. I knew that the ingredients were a bunch of artificial additives and emulsifiers, but honestly, I was hungry, and usually there was nothing else healthy to eat. It wasn't until our chief scientist, Sarah Berry, explained the physics of snack foods on this show that it finally clicked.

15:23Highly processed bars are engineered to be eaten fast and release their sugar immediately, which in my case caused a sharp spike and then crash in my blood sugar, leading a few minutes later to a collapse in my energy and a spike in my hunger. In my opinion, this is a cynical move by big food companies to make us eat more. I was furious, but Sarah said she thought we could solve this. She came back a year later with the Zoe Gut Health Bar and had done something completely radical. She'd left the natural cell structures of the plants intact. The first time I tried a sample, I realized you physically cannot rush it.

16:03It tastes great, but because the bar preserves that natural food matrix, it's also wonderfully dense and chewy. So it forces me to slow down and savor it. It delivers a huge diversity of over 12 plants. And because it breaks down slowly in your body, you avoid that sudden sugar spike and crash. Plus, both flavors are just delicious. My favorite is, of course, the 70 % dark chocolate one. I've got to admit, as a chocoholic, I did ask our gut health scientists to make sure we had that option. If you're ready to swap your additive-laden snack bar for something that's designed to be good for your gut health, head over to zoe.com slash snack bar.

16:46That's zoe.com slash snack bar. Your gut will thank you. Thank you.