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Welcome to The Model Health Show.

This is Fitness and Nutrition expert, Sean Stevenson.

And I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today.

A brand new study published in the peer-reviewed journal HyperTension has people waking up to alarming news today.

The study found that people who regularly take naps have a much greater chance of developing high blood pressure and having a stroke.

In fact, study participants who typically nap during the day were 12% more likely to develop high blood pressure over time and were 24% more likely to have a stroke compared to people who don't take naps.

And regularly napping for people under the age of 60 was found to increase the risk of developing high blood pressure by 20% compared with people who never or rarely nap.

Now, before we go falling asleep to what this study actually means, let's perk up, listen in, and make sense of what the data is really telling us.

The study used a wide array of data points from over 358,000 test subjects. This is a great data set.

Now, these individuals would track for four years and provided blood, urine, and saliva samples on a regular basis, and they were also providing details about their napping habits.

What made frequent napping stand out as a potential risk factor for disease is the fact that these results held true even when people were excluded that had other risk factors for hypertension.

This included people with type 2 diabetes excluded existing high blood pressure excluded existing high cholesterol excluded.

Also, people with sleep disorders, people who did night shift work excluded. So they were really focusing in to find out and make sure that these confounding factors were not playing a role here in their data.

The people who were regularly taking naps, again, were found to have upwards of a 20% greater incidence of developing high blood pressure and a 24% greater incidence of having a stroke.

Again, so they eliminated as many confounding factors as they could in their particular data set.

There are some additional questions that we're going to ask today, but they did a pretty good job at identifying like, hey, this is really something interesting.

There's something going on with this practice of napping and developing cardiovascular risk factors.

Now, even though they did do a great job of adjusting for major risk factors, they still didn't address the underlying cause of the frequent need or desire to take naps during the day by the study participants.

This is a glaring hole in this brand new study again, publishing one of our most prestigious journals. This was coming from the American Heart Association and publishing this data and it could put people in alarm like, wait a minute, napping is bad for me.

And this is not the complete story. So again, listen in and let's really break this stuff down because once more we're not looking at this is not including the study.

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