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What’s the rice-roti link to heart attack? Know how excess carbs are adding to bad cholesterol

Reduce carbs to 30 per cent of your daily calorie allowance.

When you consume excess carbohydrates and simple sugars, your body converts them into triglycerides and stores them as fat in your body. Excess Carbs could affect the heart.

When you consume excess carbohydrates and simple sugars, your body converts them into triglycerides and stores them as fat in your body. (Credit: pexels.com)

In recent times, there has been a lot of talk about reducing oil consumption in our diet. But we need to reduce another macronutrient as much — carbohydrates. We suggest that the daily recommended intake of cooking oil for an adult should be four teaspoons or around 20 g. But what good is restricting oil when you don’t restrict carbohydrates?

Considering Indians have mostly sedentary lives, their overall calorie intake should be between 1,400 to 1,600 calories per day unless they have very high activity. So for your total calorie allowance during the day, reserve 30 per cent from carbohydrates, 15 to 20 per cent from fat, 30 to 40 per cent from protein and the remaining from fibre, which though low in calories can give you energy when it is fermented by gut bacteria. But a typical Indian diet has a high proportion of carbohydrates, between 50 and 70 per cent of daily carbohydrate allowance.

How do carbs impact the heart?

The logic is simple, excess calories get converted to fat. So even if you are controlling dietary fat intake, unless you stop limiting your carbs, your body fat is still high.

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When you consume excess carbohydrates and simple sugars, your body converts them into triglycerides and stores them as fat in your body. This process happens in the liver when you eat more calories than you burn. This fat is the reason for abdominal obesity. Triglycerides can trigger inflammation of your arteries that leads to plaque buildup or atherosclerosis. Excess carbs over time can lead to insulin resistance, when the body stops responding to insulin as it should. Chronic high blood sugar can promote inflammation in the body, which is again linked to atherosclerosis.

The impact on good and bad cholesterol

Triglycerides and high density lipoprotein (HDL) or good cholesterol are inversely related, so when the former goes up in the body, the latter falls. Triglycerides also convert the large, buoyant and not so risky low density lipoprotein (LDL) or bad cholesterol molecules into small, dense and sticky ones harmful to the heart.

Carbohydrates with a high glycaemic index, or the rate at which sugary foods break down in the body, like white bread and sugary drinks, are more likely to cause rapid blood sugar spikes and contribute to formation of “sticky” LDL. This can penetrate the lining of arteries easily, form plaques, harden arteries and trigger inflammation, even if the overall LDL cholesterol level seems normal in test reports. Soluble fibre blocks the LDL absorption in the body and that’s why we insist on including fibre in your diet.

Studies have shown that mortality is higher in those who consumed excess carbohydrates, beating saturated fats.

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What should be your triglyceride limit?

A triglyceride level over 200 mg/dL raises your risk for a heart attack or stroke. You should try to keep your triglycerides below 100 mg/dL to reduce your risk of heart disease.

(Dr Shetty is lead cardiologist and medical director at Sparsh Hospital, Bengaluru)

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