Consumption of sugary drinks results in some 184,000 deaths worldwide each year, a new analysis found. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/sugary-drinks-take-a-deathly-toll/?ref=health&smid=tw-nytimes
To reach their conclusions, scientists pooled data from dozens of dietary surveys and large prospective studies of the effect of sugar-sweetened beverage intake on body mass index and Type 2 diabetes, and of the effect of B.M.I. on cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. They used data on sweetened drink consumption from 62 national dietary surveys, which included more than 600,000 people in 51 countries surveyed between 1980 and 2010. The study is online in Circulation.
For confirming disease-specific causes of death, researchers used the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors 2010, an international analysis that is periodically updated.
Worldwide, they estimate that sweetened drinks cause 133,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease, and 6,450 from cancers.
Deaths linked to sugary drinks as a percent of all deaths from these causes varied widely by age and country, from less than 1 percent among Japanese people older than 65 to 30 percent in Mexicans under 45. In the United States, about 25,000 deaths a year are caused by sweetened drinks.
“There’s no need to drink these beverages,” said the senior author, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. “They’re causing tens of thousands of deaths, and we should eliminate them from the food supply.”