Could diet soft drinks cause heart attacks and strokes?

The diet sugar-free soft drink…often seen as a beneficial tool in the quest for weight loss and a staple in the diet of many people trying to lose weight that may have a sweet tooth. With almost zero calories and apparently none of the spoonfuls of sugar that has been lumped into their full-sugared counterparts, diet drinks are almost too good to be true.

However, this too good to be true mantra, may actually be fitting after the alarming findings of a new study into artificially sweetened fizzy drinks and the impact they can have on our body.

Worryingly, those people who are drinking two or more diet soft drinks each day may be a staggering 50% more likely to die because heart disease. This conclusion was arrived at after health experts looked at the diet drink consumption of nearly 60,000 people taking part in the women’s health initiative, a long-term US study into the cardiovascular health of post-menopausal women.

The average age of the women was calculated at 62.8 and all women must have had no prior history of cardiovascular problems to be involved in the study.

Through a questionnaire, women were asked to document how many diet drinks they drank over a duration of three months, with a drink being taken as a 12oz (355ml) sized beverage including diet soft and fruit drinks.

The researchers tracked the women for an average follow-up time of about 9 years, variety of negative outcomes occurred in 8.5% of those who drank at least two diet drinks each day. These negative outcomes included: coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, heart attack, ischemic stroke, peripheral arterial disease and cardiovascular death.

In contrast, negative outcomes occurred in 6.9% of the women who drank between five and seven drinks each week, within 6.8% that had drank one to four drinks per week, and 7.2% drinking between zero and three diet drinks each month.

“Our findings are in line with and extend data from previous studies showing an association between diet drinks and metabolic syndrome,” commented Dr Ankur Vyas, of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, lead investigator of the study. The syndrome has been linked to a number of risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity.

“We only found an association, so we can’t say that diet drinks cause these problems,” Dr Vyas added, highlighting there may be other reasons for the link between diet drinks and a risk of heart attack and stroke.

Dr Vyas stressed that the women who had drink two or more diet drinks each day were typically younger in age, more likely to smoke, with a higher prevalence of diabetes, high blood pressure and of being overweight, adding that further research should be conducted to see if there is an actual definite link between diet drinks and cardiovascular risk.

Sugary drinks linked to 200,000 deaths each year around the world

It has been claimed that the consumption of sugary soft drinks could be causing almost 200,000 deaths each year around the world.

The claims emanate from Harvard researchers who used data extracted from a huge investigation into causes of global disease – the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases study, and have now been able to link 180,000 deaths a year worldwide to high-sugar fizzy drinks.

Gitanjali Singh, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study presented the findings this week at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans.

After a painstaking five years spent putting the pieces together of a complex analysis into global fatalities, Singh and his colleagues were able to attribute sugary drinks to approximately 133,000 deaths from diabetes, 44,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 deaths from cancer during 2010.

There appeared to be a demographic division in the findings with a high proportion (78%) of the deaths occurring in the lower-to-middle income countries in comparison to wealthier nations. Being able to afford private healthcare could be a factor that contributed to this statistic.

The analysis found that Latin American and Caribbean countries had seen the most diabetes-related deaths linked to sugary drinks (38,000). In addition, East and Central Europe had the most heart-related deaths associated to sugary drinks (11,000).

From the 15 highest populated countries within the analysis, it was determined that Mexico had the highest sugary drink-associated death rate – 318 deaths per million adults. Japan was the country with the lowest sugary drink-associated death rate, at just 10 deaths for every million adults.

Sugar-sweetened drinks have been widely known to contribute weight gain and obesity. This then raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer.

The U.S. study is more evidence that high-sugar, high-calorie fizzy drinks that offer no nutritional value are a danger to public health and playing a major part in the UK’s growing number of diabetes cases – described as a ‘public health emergency’ only a fortnight ago.

Gitanjali Singh released a statement about the findings of the study, commenting: “We know that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to obesity, and that a large number of deaths are caused by obesity-related diseases. But until now, nobody had really put these pieces together. I think our findings should really impel policymakers to make effective policies to reduce sugary beverage consumption since it causes a significant number of deaths.”

However, the American Beverage Association has disputed the study, describing it as ‘more about sensationalism than science’. Releasing a statement, the group said: “It does not show that consuming sugar-sweetened beverages causes chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer – the real causes of death among the studied subjects. The researchers make a huge leap when they take beverage intake calculations from around the globe and allege that those beverages are the cause of deaths which the authors themselves acknowledge are due to chronic disease.”