Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Eating fiber and protein before carbs might help control blood sugar spikes better than eating just one of them — like they work better together in real-life eating.
Eating your vegetables and protein before your carbs can help prevent big blood sugar spikes after a meal. This effect is seen in both healthy people and those with type 2 diabetes.
High blood pressure and high insulin levels might not cause each other — they could both be caused by something else underneath.
Insulin might not actually raise your blood pressure after all — recent studies haven't been able to prove that having too much insulin in your blood leads to high blood pressure.
Having trouble with insulin in people who have diabetes or are overweight might play a role in getting high blood pressure — which often shows up with those conditions — but we're not sure if it's actually causing it.
In older male rats, the protective barrier in a brain area that controls blood pressure gets leaky and causes brain inflammation, but this gets fixed after six weeks of eating more fiber. This might explain how gut health affects blood pressure. This finding is from the abstract summary - full study details were not available.
Older male rats with kidney-related sodium problems seem to get better when they eat more fiber for six weeks — it might help their kidneys work more normally as they age.
Eating a lot of fiber might help older male rats keep their gut bacteria healthy and lower their blood pressure, which could mean better aging.
When someone has metabolic syndrome, high blood sugar and unhealthy fats in the blood team up with high blood pressure to harm the blood vessels and kidneys, making things worse over time.
A brain pathway activated by the fat hormone leptin turns up the body’s ‘fight or flight’ system and raises blood pressure in obesity—even when insulin is high—so this brain signal may be more important than insulin for causing high blood pressure.
Fat around the kidneys in obese people squishes them, raises pressure inside, and makes the body hold onto salt, which helps cause high blood pressure—especially in people with belly fat.
Some people and animals can have serious insulin problems without getting high blood pressure — even when they're obese — which means these insulin issues don't always cause high blood pressure.
Even though high insulin levels can briefly rev up the nervous system and make the kidneys hold onto salt, having high insulin for a long time doesn’t seem to raise blood pressure in people or animals — fat or thin — so it probably isn’t the main reason high blood pressure happens in obesity.
If we reduce insulin resistance and high insulin levels in the body, it might help lower blood pressure — so better insulin health could mean healthier blood pressure.
Having too much insulin in your blood or your body not responding well to insulin might be linked to heart attacks and kidney problems, especially in people with long-term high blood pressure.
Insulin might raise blood pressure by revving up the body's 'fight or flight' system and making the kidneys hold onto more salt, which can increase pressure in the blood vessels.
If your parents have high blood pressure, you might be more likely to have problems with how your body handles insulin—even if your blood pressure is normal.
High insulin levels and insulin resistance are linked to high blood pressure in people, especially those who are overweight — but even some people at a healthy weight. This connection doesn’t show up in other types of high blood pressure, so it might be a key factor in the most common kind.
If you have high blood pressure, improving your sleep habits might help lower it by several points—on average about 5.6 mmHg—especially if your blood pressure is already in the high range. People with normal levels don’t seem to get the same benefit.
Getting more sleep might lower your blood pressure more than just improving how well you sleep — one study found that adding extra sleep lowered blood pressure by almost twice as much as other sleep therapies.
Therapies that help people sleep better, like CBT-I and sleep hygiene, can lower the top number of your blood pressure if you have insomnia. However, they don't seem to change the bottom number or your heart rate.
If you're someone who doesn't get enough sleep and are at higher risk for heart problems, just sleeping longer could lower your blood pressure by several points — like taking a small dose of medicine — according to a review of several small studies.
If you have trouble sleeping, fixing your sleep habits — like doing CBT for insomnia or just going to bed earlier — might lower your blood pressure by about 5 points, especially if it's already high.
In healthy adults, how much or how well you sleep doesn’t seem to affect your resting heart or stress system — at least when sleep is measured objectively, which might mean earlier findings were off.