Washington: According to a study, high-fat diets appear bad for blood pressure in both younger males and females. Speaking about the study, Dr. Jennifer C. Sullivan of Augusta University said, “You have a lot of people consuming high-fat diets and we don’t know enough about what effect it’s having on females.”
The study looked simultaneously at young males and female Dahl salt-sensitive rats, bred to become hypertensive in response to a high-salt diet. More recently, male Dahl rats have been shown to also have significant blood pressure response to a high-fat diet.
“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,” said Sullivan, the study’s corresponding author. They found the usual cardiovascular protection afforded to younger females appeared lost in the face of high fat consumption.
While the young male rats, like male humans, started out with higher blood pressure than their female counterparts, both sexes rapidly experienced a comparable degree of blood pressure increase. “You put them on high salt, and the males have a bigger increase in pressure; you put them on fat, and males and females have the same increase in pressure,” Sullivan said.