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Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

time.com

61–70 of 259 posts

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#61
post #22

Were these sodas sweetened with cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup? (I did look at the abstract of the actual paper, but it doesn't seem to specify. The full paper might say, but it's paywalled.)

I don't think it matters but chances are it's HFCS.

It matters.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [..] In many (most?) restaurants, your beverage choices comprise soda and water. This reminds me that in Belgium there's a fast food chain with menus for which the cashier can't swap the soda for water.

This is true for a lot of US resturants (especially fast food) they don't have a button for water, instead they just ring up a soda, and fill it with water.

I think the majority of the cost is the packaging The concentrated soda and carbonation isn't free, but a tiny fraction of the cost of the cup, lid and straw.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#63
post #32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its generally understood that most artificial sweeteners are seen as sugar by the body, but don't actually get turned into sugar in the bloodstream. So it makes sense that it might contribute to diabetes (your body digests it like sugar), but not aging (which is accelerated by sugar in the bloodstream). I believe the whole point of coke 0 is that it doesn't use an artificial sweetener? But don't quote me on t…

Coke Zero for the US market still uses aspartame, the same sweetener used in Diet Coke. Coke Zero is a more modern formulation which is supposed to taste more like "classic" Coke than Diet, which has its own distinctive "artificial" flavor which some customers have become accustomed to. It's also marketed very squarely towards young men: during the recent "Share a Coke with X" campaign, there was even a "Share a Coke…

There's also a Coke Zero Splenda version that substitutes Splenda for aspartame, but it's a separate product from the normal Coke Zero.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#64
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) Soda is very refreshing. This is important in warmer climates. If it is 98 degrees outside (37C), an orange Fanta does a much better job of making me feel better than just water This is entirely psychological, right? What about soda would make it more refreshing physically than water?

I think it's the carbonation. When I realized that's the part I really enjoyed, I started drinking seltzer water (and a lot of it, because I didn't get the uncomfortable feeling that sugary soda gave me.)

the other weird thing is how hard it is to find carbonated seltzer in America... in Western Europe you basically trip over container loads of the stuff at every supermarket's entrance. Makes you wonder if carbonated seltzer is what might help change North American soda consumption habits

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#65

The key results from the paper: After adjustment for sociodemographic and health-related characteristics, sugar-sweetened soda consumption was associated with shorter telomeres (b = –0.010; 95% confidence interval [CI] = −0.020, −0.001; P = .04). Consumption of 100% fruit juice was marginally associated with longer telomeres (b = 0.016; 95% CI = −0.000, 0.033; P = .05). No significant associations were observed betwe…

> So they saw 'aging' with sugar-sweetened soda, the opposite with fruit juice, and no significant difference with diet sodas or non-carbonated sugary sodas. What compounds in soda are most likely causing this? If they're not seeing the results in fruit juice, its not sugar causing the damage.

Nutrition doesn't work like that- there are too many variables. It could be something that fruit juice has and soda doesn't, it could be a confluence of factors that require lateral thinking.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#67

The key results from the paper: After adjustment for sociodemographic and health-related characteristics, sugar-sweetened soda consumption was associated with shorter telomeres (b = –0.010; 95% confidence interval [CI] = −0.020, −0.001; P = .04). Consumption of 100% fruit juice was marginally associated with longer telomeres (b = 0.016; 95% CI = −0.000, 0.033; P = .05). No significant associations were observed betwe…

> So they saw 'aging' with sugar-sweetened soda, the opposite with fruit juice, and no significant difference with diet sodas or non-carbonated sugary sodas. What compounds in soda are most likely causing this? If they're not seeing the results in fruit juice, its not sugar causing the damage.

There's more than one kind of sugar. Juices have both fructose and glucose; the former is more likely to be stored by the liver, the latter is deployed more widely around the body. Soda has much higher levels of fructose than glucose, thanks to all that high-fructose corn syrup that has become so popular with food manufacturers. There seems to be mounting evidence that high fructose intake is correlated with increased obesity. Here's a recent article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/society/the-shape-we-are-in-blog/...

If you head to YouTube and look for Dr Robert Lustig, a researcher at UCSF, there's a 1 or 2 hour lecutre he has delivered on this topic which goes into great detail ont eh different metabolic pathways different kinds of sugar take within the body.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This study doesn't seem to show that soda ages you (as the article states), but instead that sugary soda consumption indicates a tendency towards other activities/habits that may prematurely age you. No offense, but the authors are very accomplished public health researchers. If their study showed what you suggest, I think that would be their headline. What they showed with (relative) certainty is that those who dr…

I don't see any reason to discount the authors, but a couple of things to keep in mind: 1) This is Time's popularization of their study, so Time is naturally going to put forward the most interesting and least nuanced claims of theirs. 2) They may be accomplished researchers, but if you are well-versed in an academic discipline and read material in it, it quickly becomes clear that sometimes points which seem obvious…

The Time article is actually a very dry summary of the study's key finding, written in colloquial but not sensational language. It also has a link to the study in the very first sentence. I found the full text very easily: http://www.chc.ucsf.edu/ame_lab/pdfs/Leung%20et%20al%202014a...

The poster above could easily have satisfied his/her own curiosity on this point. 'Did researchers control for [extremely obvious thing]?' is becoming like 'correlation is not causation' - a smart-sounding thing to say instead of going to the effort of engaging with the material. It only took me 2 minutes to track down the paper and find that the covariate factors are discussed in detail over a full page of the paper.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they saw 'aging' with sugar-sweetened soda, the opposite with fruit juice, and no significant difference with diet sodas or non-carbonated sugary sodas. What compounds in soda are most likely causing this? If they're not seeing the results in fruit juice, its not sugar causing the damage.

There's more than one kind of sugar. Juices have both fructose and glucose; the former is more likely to be stored by the liver, the latter is deployed more widely around the body. Soda has much higher levels of fructose than glucose, thanks to all that high-fructose corn syrup that has become so popular with food manufacturers. There seems to be mounting evidence that high fructose intake is correlated with increase…

HFCS is equal parts fructose and glucose, same as sucrose.

Lustig is an obese laughing stock and derided by real nutritionists.

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