Soft drink risk
Soft drinks could lead to an early death, according to a new study.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently concluded a study across 10 European countries, with 450,000 participants over an average period of 16 years to assess whether sweetened soft drinks could affect mortality.
The results showed that participants who drank sugar-sweetened soft drinks had a 26% higher risk of dying during the study than those who drank fewer than one glass a month. The study also looked at those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks. The results were just as grim: people who drank two or more glasses of artificially sweetened drinks were more likely to die due to circulatory disease, and those who drank one a day were more likely to die from digestive diseases than those who rarely drank soft drinks.
“The striking observation in our study was that we found positive associations for both sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks with risk of all-cause deaths,” said research lead Dr Neil Murphy. It was assumed that sweeteners such as aspartame trigger some of the same biological actions as sugar, although more research is needed to prove this conclusively
