Goats and soda: NPR

An advertisement for a soft drink brand featuring local music stars is seen in Mansa district of India's Punjab province on Tuesday, August 8, 2023.

Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

hide title

Switch title

Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sparkling water is a rare treat richmond ajeti Growing up in Ghana in the 1980s.

“Perhaps during the holidays, you might see soda in your home” — like Christmas, he said.

Sodas are now commonplace, he said. For some children, buying sugary drinks as snacks or lunches is part of their daily routine at school. “There are ads on TV, in video games and on billboards,” Aryeetey said. “So it's like it's all over your face. You become a little helpless in a sense.”

Ayeti, a public health nutritionist at the University of Ghana, said the push for soda has created a “perfect storm”.

a vast new study Emphasizing his point. The news isn't that soda is bad for you—that's long been known—researchers say there's more sugar in the liquid form than we realize. Empty calories increase the risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer.

But this report introduces an unprecedented set of data exploring the consequences of drinking soda. Past studies have used national estimates of sugar consumption rather than individual reports. But this new effort draws on the Global Diet Database, a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (a funder of NPR and this blog). The database provides 450 surveys covering 2.9 million people in 118 countries. They say self-reported data provides a more accurate picture – although they also acknowledge that people often underreport their sugar consumption.

The research model also incorporates previous research showing how sugary drinks contribute to conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. While this study can't definitively say that sugary drinks like soda cause these health problems, it models some of the global impacts of our increasing sugar consumption.

The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts University, was published in natural medicineIt is estimated that in 2020, sugary drinks such as soda and energy drinks caused more than 330,000 deaths and 3 million new cases of diabetes and heart disease. That's a big jump from estimates in a 2015 study, which found 184,000 deaths from drinking sugary drinks. Sugary drinks.

“It's a lot of pain,” said Dr. Darius Mozaffarianis study author and director of the Food as Medicine Institute at Tufts University. “I think our results do show that this is not a trivial matter.”

The team's research shows that soda-related health problems are increasing and concentrated in certain areas. Sub-Saharan Africa has seen the largest increases in incidence since 1990, with type 2 diabetes rates rising to nearly 9% and heart disease rates rising by more than 4%.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, cases of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease linked to sugary drinks have remained relatively high over the past few decades, the study found. In these areas, sugary drinks were responsible for nearly a quarter of new diabetes cases in 2020.

The study also provides information on soda consumption. For example, in Colombia, people drink an estimated 17 sugary drinks per week, or more than two 8-ounce drinks per day, according to the study's supplemental data.

For study author Laura Lara-Custer, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Washington, this statistic proves the need for measures to reduce soda consumption — such as taxes on sugary drinks. Assessing the findings, she said: “All of these situations we could have avoided.”