From soda to sweet tea, sugary drinks can be sweetly delicious. Sipping too many, however, can come with a serious cost.
A new study out of Tufts University recently found millions of diabetes and heart disease cases can be traced back to sugar-sweetened beverages every year. In 2020, 48% of Columbia’s diabetes cases were because of sodas and other sugary drinks. The same was true for nearly a third of Mexico’s cases, as well as 27.6% of South Africa’s. Worldwide, an estimated 2.2 million new cases of Type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease appear each year.
“Sugar-sweetened beverages are heavily marketed and sold in low- and middle-income nations,” Dariush Mozaffarian, senior study author and director of Friedman School’s Food is Medicine Institute, told Tufts Now. “Not only are these communities consuming harmful products, but they are also often less well equipped to deal with the long-term health consequences.”
According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 67% of adults in the South drink one or more sugary beverages a day. The CDC also associated frequently drinking sugary beverages with weight gain, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, non-alcoholic liver disease, tooth decay and gout.
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported sugar-sweetened beverages are the single largest source of calories and added sugar in U.S. diets, averaging 150 calories and 7-10 teaspoons of sugar each. Drinking just a single soda each day can cause up to 5 pounds in annual weight gain.
“We need urgent, evidence-based interventions to curb consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages globally, before even more lives are shortened by their effects on diabetes and heart disease,” Laura Lara-Castor, first study author, told Tufts Now.
Credit: HANDOUT
Credit: HANDOUT
According to the study, sugary drinks caused around 10% of all diabetes and 3.33% of all cardiovascular disease cases worldwide in 2020 leading to an estimated 340,000 deaths.
“Much more needs to be done, especially in countries in Latin America and Africa where consumption is high and the health consequence severe,” Mozaffarian said. “As a species, we need to address sugar-sweetened beverage consumption.”
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