By Beth Howard | Posted January 26 2011
Sweet drinks pose surprising threats to health and speed aging
Guest blogger Beth Howard (www.bethhowardwriter.com) writes about health and medicine for publications including Prevention, Reader’s Digest, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, The Washington Post and AARP Magazine. She formerly was an editor at Self, New Woman and Omni magazines.
Everybody knows that sugary sodas, fruit drinks and other sweetened beverages don’t do them any good. But they may not realize these drinks can actually harm their health. In fact, according to a new study, sugar-sweetened drinks were responsible for 14,000 new cases of heart disease, 75,000 new cases of diabetes, and 7,000 premature deaths over the last decade.
The researchers, from the University of California at San Francisco, gauged the impact of such beverages using the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model. It relies on data from three long-running studies—the Framingham Heart Study, The Nurses Health Study and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
While alarming, the findings were not entirely surprising. Past studies show that consuming the “empty” calories of sweetened drinks leads to weight gain. And obesity is strongly linked to both heart disease and diabetes risk.
“But in addition to that, the data suggest that there is even more diabetes among people drinking a lot of sweetened beverages than you would expect from the weight they gained,” says co-study author Pamela Coxson, Ph.D. That lines up with a new Harvard School of Public Health study that found drinking just one to two sugar-laden beverages a day raises diabetes risk by 26 percent.
Accelerated Aging: Sugary beverages also have more visible effects, thanks to high quantities of fructose—a type of sugar commonly found in sodas and other processed sweet drinks. Researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague recently demonstrated that the skin of rats fed a high-fructose solution were the least elastic.
The same seems true for human skin. The more sugary foods and drinks people consumed, the deeper their facial wrinkles, shows a study from Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
Why the effect? When the sugar in foods and beverages hits the blood stream, it sets off a process known as glycation, in which the sugars attach to proteins and form harmful molecules called advanced glycation end products (AGEs), according to skin care researcher Peter T. Pugliese, M.D. AGEs cross-link with collagen and elastin fibers, making the normally resilient tissues weak or inflexible—and skin that doesn’t bounce back is more prone to wrinkles and sagging. All types of sugar can wreak havoc on the skin and other body tissues, though fructose appears to be the worst for producing AGEs.
Sweet Relief: Kicking the sweet-drink habit can pay off, however. When researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared different weight-loss strategies among a group of 810 people, only those who cut out sugar-sweetened beverages experienced statistically significant drop in pounds. Decreases in disease rates and the signs of aging would be other welcome benefits of snubbing soda.
The authors of the UCSF study offer one promising solution: a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks. “Proposals to curb population-wide consumption of sugared beverages through taxation, if successful, could yield large benefits for the health of the population and effectively stem health care costs,” they write.
CONNECT THE DOTS
Sweet drinks are often hidden sources of unhealthy calories. With Calorie Count a website and iPhone app, users can browse 110,000 brand-name beverages and foods for their calorie content and other “Nutrition Facts” label information and then add the items to a daily food log. The iPhone app Foobi lets users record every food and drink they consume, track their intake over time and compare it with previous weeks to manage their diet.
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