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Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

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41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#41
post #28

I don't understand, maybe due to a language difference. Does 100% fruit juice mean the store bought 100% fruit guice (the premium brands?) or literally freshly squeezed orange, immediately drank? Wouldn't also eating fresh fruits be linked?

Out of curiosity what do you see as the difference? Is it just how long the juice sat there? Or are you suggesting they add something to (not-from-concentrate) "100% fruit juice" that isn't listed in the ingredients?

I'm no food technologist but squeeze an orange and put it in a glass, which is pure orange guice (100%?) and leave it on a table, and do the same with the 100% store bought one. The one from a bottle or cardboard box, not the "squeezed today" ones which are refrigerated. There will certainly be a difference, the freshly squeezed one will be stale, possibly ransid within a day. The bought one, not so sure... So there is obviously "something" else. Either preservative or some process done to the fruite.

Not to mention the taste.

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#42
post #10

Interesting results... so sugary drinks AND 100% fruit juices are associated with an increase in cancer risks. I guess I'm not surprised at all about the sugary drinks, but fruit juices... maybe. Artificially sweetened beverages showed no increase. I guess now we watch for headlines like "Soda Causes Cancer" which is not what this really says.

Fruit juice and soda are effectively the same to your body. They’re both high-fructose liquids which spike blood sugar and lead to insulin resistance. The only meaningful difference is that a fruit juice probably also includes some vitamins that the soda doesn’t. Sources: anything published by Dr. Robert Lustig @ UCSF

Most fruit juices have a GI of ~50, which is moderate (about the same as a sweet potato). They don't really spike blood-sugar. Fructose is low-GI. They also contain other phytonutrients and flavenoids which may aid health in appropriate doses (e.g. hesperetin and naringenin in citrus juices).

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#44
post #28

I don't understand, maybe due to a language difference. Does 100% fruit juice mean the store bought 100% fruit guice (the premium brands?) or literally freshly squeezed orange, immediately drank? Wouldn't also eating fresh fruits be linked?

One very intuitive explanation I've heard: It's very difficult to eat 5 oranges in one go. It's very easy to drink the same 5 oranges as a fresh squeezed drink. So it's basically a question of quantity, eating it makes you full very quickly, unlike drinking it.

Possibly, but two oranges usually fill up a glass nicely.

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#46

Does anyone know the answer to this question? If I am going to drink a soda, which soda am I better off drinking? Coke or Diet Coke/Coke Zero? I know that neither option is good for me, but which would be comparatively better or is the science still out on that?

If you are just going to drink it once, there is no difference.

If you are going to drink them habitually then we need to know more about the contexts in which you drink them, how often, etc. If you were to only drink one per week for example and you are otherwise living a healthy life, then probably you would find something like “they are about dead even but maybe the Coke is ever so slightly healthier?”—this sort of thing gets dominated by the really little things like some people have phenylketonuria which means they shouldn’t consume proteins containing the amino acid phenylalanine, and aspartame is a really simple protein (only two amino acids, I think?) containing phenylalanine.

On the flip side, if you drink a lot of Coke or fruit juice, each dose is giving you about as much calories as a glass of beer or wine and a similar analysis results; a bunch of those calories in both cases need to be processed by your liver and your liver can get overworked and even if it doesn’t get overworked you are likely not hitting the gym once for each sugary drink and so the surplus energy increases your equilibrium weight until you start burning the extra calories by merely existing.

By contrast the research on artificial sweeteners tends to not show negative effects here. There are some potential risks; I know a guy who is very DIY-health-ish who used to taste his urine because of some prediabetic condition where he would pee out sugars; he said that he would never drink Diet Coke again because it made his urine taste sweet (most of it passed through unharmed) but unnaturally foul (some of the aspartame was getting converted into something really nasty).

But the key thing is that most artificial sweeteners are thousands or tens of thousands of times more sweet than sugar, so there's actually surprisingly few molecules in the drink that are artificial, so you tend to get an unusually low dose of any toxicity. This is also why artificial sweeteners have a huge problem matching the natural taste of sugar—amplification of a weak signal always makes it really hard to replicate a target signal.

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#47
post #30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This study seems to very clearly indicate Diet Coke/Coke Zero is much healthier than Coke. There are tons of studies like this that concretely show how bad sugar is for you, while most studies show that artificial sweeteners have no (or minimal relative to sugar) adverse health effects.

Diet drinks seem to not affect cancer, but the jury is still out on heart disease.

I would agree that the jury is still out on diet drinks and heart disease, but it is pretty conclusive[1][2][3] that regular soda increases your risk of heart disease.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/daily-sugary-drink-linked-hear...

[2] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/aha-dsd03141...

[3] https://consumer.healthday.com/cardiovascular-health-informa...

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#48
post #7
post #5

Now that's surprising. I would have guessed artificial sweeteners would have had more cancerous effects than "natural" sugars, but I guess that's just a logical fallicy where I assume lab synthesized chemicals are automatically worse for your body than plant synthesized chemicals.

How long have artificial sweeteners been on the market? How many people only drink artificially sweetened drinks?

I'm type II and other than the odd fruit juice, only drink artificially sweetened drinks. More and more stevia sweetened drinks recently, which I guess doesn't qualify as artificial though.

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#49
post #23

Does anyone know the answer to this question? If I am going to drink a soda, which soda am I better off drinking? Coke or Diet Coke/Coke Zero? I know that neither option is good for me, but which would be comparatively better or is the science still out on that?

This study seems to very clearly indicate Diet Coke/Coke Zero is much healthier than Coke. There are tons of studies like this that concretely show how bad sugar is for you, while most studies show that artificial sweeteners have no (or minimal relative to sugar) adverse health effects.

Aspartame is bad for your in large quantities. The safe standard is 40mg/kg/day.

So my guess it is safer than sugar.

Claims that artificial sweetners are bad fall into the category of drinking litres of water in a short period of time.

Re: Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

#50
post #5

Now that's surprising. I would have guessed artificial sweeteners would have had more cancerous effects than "natural" sugars, but I guess that's just a logical fallicy where I assume lab synthesized chemicals are automatically worse for your body than plant synthesized chemicals.

Artificially sweetened drinks are extremely bad. Refer to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30802187

Some caution needs to be used when interpreting these results. The ASB intake was self-reported with a lot of potential errors. The authors state:

"Additionally, women with high intakes of ASB of all types may have differed systematically in many ways from women with little or no intake, most especially since they were more likely to be obese and have a higher energy intake."

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