Sugar and Heart Health: Understand the Connection and Your Next Steps

Dishing Up Nutrition

Nutritional Weight & Wellness, Inc.

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness:nutrition, Nutrition

4.3 • 866 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sugar doesn’t just affect your waistline; it can quietly affect your heart, too. In this episode of Dishing Up Nutrition, dietitians Leah Kleinschrodt and Teresa Wagner connect the dots between sugar (and high-carb foods), blood sugar spikes, inflammation, triglycerides, and cholesterol patterns that raise cardiovascular risk. You’ll learn where “hidden” sugar shows up most often, which lab markers matter most, and simple real-food next steps so you can support heart health without extreme dieting.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to by nutritional weight and wellness.
0:14.1	I'm Leah Kleintraud, a registered and licensed dietitian, and today we are digging into the surprising way sugar affects your heart health. We'll talk about
0:23.4	how sugar affects your blood vessels, your cholesterol numbers, and your everyday energy when it
0:29.6	sneaks into your diet all day, every day, maybe even without you realizing it. And to help us
0:36.0	walk through this, I'm here with my co-host and fellow dietitian
0:39.5	Teresa Wagner. Well, that's good to be here with you again, Leah. I love this topic because it connects
0:46.5	so many things that we see in practice, blood sugar, cravings, cholesterol, blood pressure,
0:53.7	then that big umbrella of heart health.
0:57.3	Yeah, it's on everybody's mind.
0:59.8	There's not a week that goes by that we're not looking at someone's lipid panel,
1:03.8	cholesterol numbers, talking about blood sugars, all of that good stuff.
1:07.5	So, yeah, you hit the nail on the head.
1:10.4	Yeah, and what we want to do today is help
1:12.3	our listeners connect the dots between the sugar in your day-to-day life. And so we're talking about
1:18.1	the stuff that comes in in the coffee drinks, your juices, the afternoon treats that you might
1:24.3	be looking for to get that boost to get you through the day, the late
1:27.6	night snacking that comes in that helps us decompress or sometimes just to kind of numb out after
1:32.6	a long day. And we want to take that sugar connected to then how is it affecting our heart
1:39.9	and our lab numbers. So we're going to start super basic.
1:44.8	I mean, as we're recording this, it's the beginning of 2026.
1:47.9	I'm hoping we have some new listeners on board with the new year
1:51.0	and kind of like with some of those resolutions on board with people.
	...

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