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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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. 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.
I have absolutely no idea what high blood pressure actually is. So what is it?

**Tim Spector** (0:53)
It is basically a hardening of the arteries and thickening of the arteries, so they're not as flexible.
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. 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, 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, 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 part of that, as well as heart disease, is high blood pressure. And they seem to have similar causes and relationships, and 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. But 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 to have brain disease in terms of dementia and affects all bits of your body to some extent. So it's not just a sudden yes or no, I'm gonna get a stroke or not. It has a really harmful effect on many aspects of your body and 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.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:43)
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?

**Tim Spector** (4:08)
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, 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 have got to be very positive about this and not think about the past, think about the future and your future years.