Do soft drinks lead to an earlier death?

Everyone knows that soft drinks contain unhealthy amounts of sugar, but new research by JAMA International Medicine suggests that diet soda might be just as bad for you, or even worse. 

The JAMA study followed 450,000 Europeans for 16 years and tracked the mortality rate among these soft-drink consumers. They found that people who drink two or more glasses of sugar-sweetened beverages (diet or regular sodas and juices) a day are 8 percent more likely to die at a younger age as opposed to people who only consume less than one glass of these beverages a month. 

They also found that artificially sweetened (diet) drinks leads to an increase in circulatory disease, which can damage the heart’s main blood vessel. On the other hand, sugar-sweetened drinks can lead to digestive failure mainly in the liver, appendix, pancreas and intestines. 

“We found that higher soft-drink intake was associated with a greater risk of death from any cause regardless of whether sugar-sweetened or artificially sweetened drinks were consumed,” said Neil Murphy, an author of the study and a researcher with the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.