Frequently drinking sugar-sweetened beverages (carbonated and noncarbonated soft drinks, fruit drinks, energy drinks, and sports drinks) was associated with an increased risk of mortality from cardiovascular diseases and, to a lesser extent, cancers, according to a new study. Substituting one sugary drink a day with an artificially sweetened drink was associated with a slightly lower risk of mortality, but drinking four or more artificially sweetened drinks a day was associated with a higher risk of mortality among women.
Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages was positively associated with mortality primarily through cardiovascular disease mortality and showed a graded association with dose. Image credit: Raw Pixel.
“Drinking water in place of sugary drinks is a healthy choice that could contribute to longevity,” said study lead author Dr. Vasanti Malik, a researcher in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Diet soda may be used to help frequent consumers of sugary drinks cut back their consumption, but water is the best and healthiest choice.”
In the study, Dr. Malik and colleagues analyzed data from 80,647 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study (1980-2014) and from 37,716 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1986-2014).
For both studies, participants answered questionnaires about lifestyle factors and health status every two years.
After adjusting for major diet and lifestyle factors, the researchers found that the more sugar-sweetened beverages a person drank, the more his or her risk of early death from any cause increased.
Compared with drinking sugar-sweetened beverages less than once per month, drinking one to four sugary drinks per month was linked with a 1% increased risk; two to six per week with a 6% increase; one to two per day with a 14% increase; and two or more per day with a 21% increase.
The increased early death risk linked with sugar-sweetened beverage consumption was more pronounced among women than among men.
There was a particularly strong link between drinking sugary beverages and increased risk of early death from cardiovascular diseases.
Compared with infrequent sugar-sweetened beverage drinkers, those who drank two or more servings per day of sugar-sweetened beverages had a 31% higher risk of early death from cardiovascular disease.
Each additional serving per day of sugar-sweetened beverages was linked with a 10% increased higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death.
Among both men and women, there was a modest link between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and early death risk from cancer.
The team also looked at the association between drinking artificially sweetened beverages and risk of early death.
The authors found that replacing sugar-sweetened beverages with artificially sweetened beverages was linked with a moderately lower risk of early death.
But they also found a link between high intake levels of artificially sweetened beverages (at least four servings/day) and slightly increased risk of both overall and cardiovascular disease-related mortality among women, so they cautioned against excessive consumption of artificially sweetened beverages.
“These findings are consistent with the known adverse effects of high sugar intake on metabolic risk factors and the strong evidence that drinking sugar-sweetened beverages increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, itself a major risk factor for premature death,” said study co-author Professor Walter Willett, also from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“The results also provide further support for policies to limit marketing of sugary beverages to children and adolescents and for implementing soda taxes because the current price of sugary beverages does not include the high costs of treating the consequences.”
The study was published online this month in the journal Circulation.
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Vasanti S. Malik et al. 2019. Long-Term Consumption of Sugar-Sweetened and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and Risk of Mortality in US Adults. Circulation 139; doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.118.037401
