According to the findings published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, carbohydrate-rich diets are associated with slightly higher blood pressure than diets rich in monounsaturated fats.
However, Dr. Meena Shah and colleagues from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, report that the difference is not enough to rationalise making recommendations to change the carbohydrate and monounsaturated fat content of the diets to control blood pressure.
The researchers conducted a review of 10 published studies, also referred to as a “meta-analysis,” that compared high-carbohydrate and high-monounsaturated fat diets to better understand their effects on blood pressure.
The results of the authors’ mathematical model unveiled that the carbohydrate-rich diets led to a remarkably higher blood pressure compared with the diets rich in monounsaturated fat.
When the analysis was restricted to studies in which the subjects were randomly assigned to one diet and then switch over to the other diet, the blood pressure readings were higher for the carbohydrate-rich diets than the monounsaturated fat diets, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Shah’s team suggests that the slight increase in blood pressure of subjects in the high-carbohydrate diet may be cause by elevated insulin levels.
It has been suggested that hyperinsulinemia enhances the activity of the sensitive nervous system, “which increases heart rate, cardiac output, vascular resistance, and sodium retention and thus blood pressure.”