Drinking coke or diet coke everyday increases risk of dying young - Researchers

Enjoying a can of Coke or Diet Coke every once in a while is fine, but scientists have issued a rather bleak warning for those who drink the fizzy beverage, and other sugary-sweetened drinks, everyday.

According to a new study, drinking sugary beverages everyday can increase the risk of dying young from cancer and heart disease.

And it's especially bad news for women, who were found to be more vulnerable to premature death, the more sugary drinks they have.

One solution might be to swap your sugary drink out for an artificially sweetened one - but experts say drinking more than four can still result in the same risk.

As part of the study, researchers questioned 80,647 women and 37,716 men every two years for
several years.

The participants answered questions about their lifestyle factors each time.

The results showed that the more sugary drinks a person drank - including carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks, fruit drinks and energy drinks - the higher their risk of early death from any cause was.

Those who drank one to four sugary drinks a month were linked to a one percent increased risk, while the risk rose to 14 percent for those who consume one or two a day.

For anyone who had more than two sugary drinks, such as Coke, a day the risk of premature death increased by a whopping 21 percent.

As well as this, scientists also discovered those who drank more than two sugary beverages a day were particularly at risk of cardiovascular disease, with each extra drink increasing the risk by 10 percent.

A link was also found between consumption of sugary drinks and a risk of dying young from cancer.

Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition said:

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.

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.

Source: mirror.co.uk