About
one in three Americans drink a can of sweetened soda every day, which is – as
you already know – a bad habit leading to weight gain and diabetes. Many people have switched to diet soda,
hoping to avoid these outcomes but still enjoy the taste of a sweet, cold,
fizzy can of Coke, Pepsi. Mountain Dew, or Dr. Pepper. You may be immune to pressure to buy these
drinks, but they are ubiquitous and their marketing is pushed at teens and
young adults.
Research
suggests that excess sugar, especially the fructose in sugary drinks, may
damage the brain. Data from the
Framingham Heart Study found that frequent users of sugary beverages are more
likely to have poorer memory, smaller overall brain volume, and a smaller hippocampus
– an area of the brain important for leaning and memory.
A
follow-up study found that people who drank a diet soda daily were
almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia when compared to
those who did not. The researchers took age,
smoking, diet quality and other factors into account, but acknowledged that
they could not completely control for preexisting conditions like diabetes,
which is a known risk factor for dementia.
They concluded tat it was somewhat surprising that diet soda consumption
led to these outcomes. While previous
studies have linked diet soda intake with stroke risk, the link with dementia
was not previously known. The studies did not differentiate between types of
artificial sweeteners. Scientists have
put forth various hypotheses about how artificial sweeteners may cause harm,
from transforming gut bacteria to altering the brain’s perception of ‘sweet’,
but they conclude that more work is needed to figure out the underlying
mechanisms.
Sudha Seshadri, professor of neurology at
Boston University School of Medicine, and senior author on the papers, wrote
“these studies are not the be-all and end-all, but it looks like there is not
very much of an upside to having sugary drinks, and substituting the sugar with
artificial sweeteners doesn’t seem to help.
Maybe good old fashioned water is something we need to get used to.
The
following is Greenwood writing: You
could also try unsweetened iced coffee or tea, or plain sparkling water with a
slice of lemon or orange. Plain
carbonated water does not adversely affect your bones or teeth, and may improve
swallowing problems in some people.
Sadja Greenwood, MD back issues at sadjascolumns.blogspot.com
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