Premature Death Risk May Increase With High Soft Drink Consumption, Study Says

High consumption of soft drinks, whether sugared or low-calorie, is likely to increase the risk of premature deaths, a study stated. According to the research, this sugary beverage is positively associated with early deaths.

Soft drinks are known to have adverse effects on health, such as increasing the risk of obesity and overweight that can eventually lead to premature deaths. Previous studies have also suggested that consumption of the sugary beverage can make kids aggressive and it can also disrupt the rhythm of the heart.

The latest research, published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday, tried to find a direct association between soft drink consumption and mortality. Through the study, the research team found out that the beverage was positively associated with all-cause deaths in 10 European countries.

For the study, the team followed over 400,000 European adults aged around 51 years for 16 years. All information about the participants was collected from the database of a multinational study called the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC).

During the analysis, the research team looked into the diet plan of each of the participants, including their soft drink consumption. Then, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their alcohol intake, smoking habits, educational level and physical activity.

The researchers then excluded the individual with no data on soft drink consumption and had conditions, like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, at the beginning of the study. Of all 451,743 participants in the study, a total of 41,693 died during the research period.

“Our results for sugar-sweetened soft drinks provide further support to limit consumption and to replace them with other healthier beverages, preferably water,” Neil Murphy, a scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer and a co-author of the study, told Reuters.

The research team noted that their findings suggest the individuals who drank two or more glasses of soft drinks a day had a 17 percent increased risk of premature deaths as compared to the people who consumed less than a glass in a month.

“For artificially sweetened soft drinks, we now need a better understanding of the mechanisms that may underlie this association and research such as ours will hopefully stimulate these efforts,” Murphy added.

The research team found that people who consumed two or more glasses of artificially sweetened soft drinks per day had a 26 percent greater risk of dying early as compared to those who drank less than a glass of the sugar-free beverage in a month.

However, Murphy admitted the study does not prove that soft drink is the root cause of premature deaths. “In these types of studies (observational epidemiology) there are other factors which may be behind the association we observed,” he said.

“For instance, high soft drink consumption may be a marker of overall unhealthy diet,” the researcher added.

Murphy further said most of the high soft drink consumers in the study had higher body mass index (BMI) and they were also likely to be tobacco smokers.

“We made statistical adjustments in our analyses for BMI, smoking habits and other mortality risk factors which may have biased our results and the positive associations remained. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that these factors were influencing our findings, hence we cannot say the associations we observe are causal,” the researcher added.

The research team concluded that “consumption of total, sugar-sweetened, and artificially sweetened soft drinks was positively associated with all-cause deaths in this large European cohort; the results are supportive of public health campaigns aimed at limiting the consumption of soft drinks”.