Sweetened Drinks Linked to Higher Mortality Risk

While sugary beverages seem to be the worst offenders, artificially sweetened drinks might also be associated with health problems, an observational study suggests.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Consuming sweet drinks such as sodas increases risk of death from heart disease and cancer, according to a multi-decade study of nearly 120,000 men and women. The findings, published yesterday (March 18) in Circulation, suggest that, while sugar-sweetened drinks cause the most harm, high intake of artificially sweetened drinks is also linked to heart disease risk, especially among women.

“The big picture is really starting to emerge,” study coauthor Vasanti Malik of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health tells CNBC, noting that the results fit into wider findings about the harm of sweet drinks. “This is not random. There’s a whole lot of consistency across these findings.”

Many studies have already connected the consumption of sugary drinks to a range of health conditions, including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. One 2015 analysis suggested that these drinks were responsible for around 184,000 deaths globally per year.

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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