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

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. 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily 30+ Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello 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.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I have absolutely no idea what high blood pressure actually is, so what is it?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  It is basically a hardening of the arteries and thickening of the arteries so that 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 short bursts, and that's normal, and it comes back again quickly. So you want a flexible, mobile system.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  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 work harder to do things. That's a very simple way of thinking about it. And where we draw the line about it being normal or 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...

• 2:17Speaker 01

  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 two diabetes, you might get obesity, get high cholesterol, and 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 two diabetes, you're more likely to have high blood pressure, but it also works the other way around as well.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  But if you've got this defect in your blood vessels, that causes stress to all your cells in the way they're pumping out energy and using fuel in all the organs in your body, makes you more likely to have kidney disease, makes you more likely to have brain disease in terms of dementia, and affects all all bits of your body to some extent. So it's it's not just a sudden yes or no, I'm going to get a stroke or not. It has a really harmful effect on 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 not healthy.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  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 in the future, even if it's been high in the past?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It'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 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 in your body will improve, the inflammation will improve. Uh. 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 if you take action. So I think you have got to be very positive about this and and not think about the past.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Think about the future and your future years. Um. And 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 i- it's such a preventable condition that we really all all need to be taking much more care of our blood pressure.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  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?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I think that's correct, yes. The 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. You can never eliminate the chance completely. Because uh sometimes people have stroke without having high blood pressure. But you can dramatically improve the odds.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  So Tim, I would love to switch now to that actionable advice. Is there anything that people can do in terms of their lifestyle?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Sedentary is like doctor's bed for sitting on the couch.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Sitting on your bum all the time. Yeah, exactly. Modern lifestyle, working at home, very bad for you. Get 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.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  That's not just one of these sort of hand wavy things, that your sleep really has an impact on your blood pressure?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it does. And again, we see this repeated because blood pressure is part of this metabolic group of of conditions that all seem to have similar causes. A poor night's sleep or doing lots of shift work or will actually raise your blood pressure. So particularly if you are doing night night work, shift work, you are more prone to these problems. So it is a risk factor. Generally, uh we did sort of laugh off stress, but if you've got. Chronic stress in your life, then that is associated with with blood pressure in many studies. And try and find ways of reducing that through something you enjoy, whether

• 7:08Speaker 01

  it's sport, or it's, 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 your blood vessels when you're going for a sauna, they're, they're trying to keep up and keep your temperature constant. So they're having a little workout.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  So this is like the gym for my blood vessels is just to sit in a sauna and sweat?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes, exactly.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  I love that. It's definitely less painful than the ice ice baths. We know that that's not my thing.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  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, everyone can do is to think what in their diet can they do to get their blood pressure down? Because every every millimeter counts.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  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 in my diet might be raising my blood pressure?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  These would be most likely be processed foods that have high salt content. We think that about eighty five percent of the salt you you get in the average American or British diet comes from prepackaged manufactured highly processed foods.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  So almost all the salt does not come from when you pour salt onto your, onto your meal?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Unless you live and work in a French restaurant, then it it's only about ten percent of your intake. It varies a bit, but it's at most twenty percent. So at least eighty percent is coming from prepackaged 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.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  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?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  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 flavours. Salt is used to disguise a lot of the chemicals that they're putting into these foods. It's also there to uh provide this hyper palatability, 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.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  So this is like a big part of what sort of big food is putting into these meals, either to hide like 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 it's sort of that sort of magic point where it's so delicious that you're just gonna eat the whole pack.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Correct, and it's obviously so vital to their product, they really haven't worked out a way of doing without it. And so i- it's the number one thing that we should be avoiding and it's the worst thing is it's in many, you know, 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,

• 10:55Speaker 01

  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 um if you do find yourself adding a lot of uh 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 uh labelled as low salt alternatives. So salt has the chemical formula sodium chloride. And these low salts are potassium chloride. And they're they're basically mix the sodium chloride with potassium chloride to give you a similar taste, but much less of the sodium and more of the potassium.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And

• 11:43Speaker 01

  When they've done clinical, randomised clinical trials of this, they show that if you switch this around and you're not having all the other sort of junk foods we talked about, you can reduce your blood pressure by about 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 prepackaged foods. That would really help that, uh, make them less harmful for us. The other big thing is, is realising that just by increasing your potassium

• 12:28Speaker 01

  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, uh, not into superfoods. I don't think people should be eating tonnes of kiwi fruit necessarily, but that's a good example of, of one that is full of potassium. But fruits and vegetables, uh, in their natural form are fantastic sources of potassium that we should all be eating more of and, uh, 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, um,

• 13:13Speaker 01

  blood pressure medications. And they can also enhance blood pressure medications. 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, et cetera, the better you'll be.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  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?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yes. So I think they should be used together. I think we should be seeing diet as another arm of medication, not as a complete alternative, only if you don't believe in medication. Because for this particular condition, that the evidence is so clear that medication will save your life and will stop you getting a stroke and heart attack. So 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

• 14:22Speaker 01

  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 your gut microbes, they're secreting other chemicals, you might then be able to wean yourself off these drugs. That's possible. You've certainly heard stories of this from people who have written to me. So bear that in mind, but you know, do that under medical supervision.

• 14:48Speaker 00

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• 15:33Speaker 00

  randomized controlled trial to check if it worked. The results blew us away and helped us create the formulation that we sell today. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fibre, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. To get your pouch of Zoe's delicious gut supplement, visit zoe.com/daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.