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Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

time.com

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Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#241

Post by Lambdanaut »

johnward wrote: post #142
Lambdanaut wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about switching over to tea or coffee? Both lack sugar and are full of anti-oxidants.

I've tried but they taste awful. Even if I get one of those sugary carmel chocolate starbucks things I can't get past the awful taste of the coffee. Ultimately I need to just quit caffeine but every time I end up back on the wagon.

There's this guy Tynan(tynan.com). He hated the taste of unsweetened tea too, but he made the switch by drinking copious amounts of green tea for two weeks until he had trained himself to enjoy it.

It could be worth a try.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#242

Post by lotsofmangos »

gwern wrote: post #235
mikeyouse wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case, all you have to do is look at how they tried to defend against the universal healthy user bias (you know, the same thing that led to such epic fails as hormone therapy?), and see that all they did was adjust for weight and some self-reports. Bzzt. They actually adjusted for age, smoking (never, former, current), pack-years of smoking, energy intake using the USDA's HEI, alcohol intake, physical activi…

> They actually adjusted for age, smoking (never, former, current), pack-years of smoking, energy intake using the USDA's HEI, alcohol intake, physical activity (some/none), BMI, and waist circumference. All of which are self-reports (food and energy intake as a self-report, when it's well known in the field that self-reports are flattering? and you have the gall to imply that this is good reliable science) or based…

Healthy user bias based on confounding factors I can understand between people who do not drink fizzy drinks and those who do.

However I would not expect it to then give a clear linear link between specific consumption and telomere length as shown in this study, as the confounding factors are unlikely to be directly linked to exactly how much you consume:

"we found that each daily 8-ounce serving of sugar-sweetened sodas was linearly associated with shorter telomeres, roughly equivalent to 1.9 additional years of aging, independent of sociodemographic characteristics and health-related variables"

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#243

Post by Arnor »

mikeyouse wrote: post #170
gwern wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's exhausting and completely unproductive. And completely accurate. You know what's more exhausting than seeing someone point out that correlation!=causation? Being whiplashed by a dozen different studies, or correlation after correlation failing when subjected to a randomized test. In this case, all you have to do is look at how they tried to defend against the universal healthy user bias (you know, the same thi…

> In this case, all you have to do is look at how they tried to defend against the universal healthy user bias (you know, the same thing that led to such epic fails as hormone therapy?), and see that all they did was adjust for weight and some self-reports. Bzzt. They actually adjusted for age, smoking (never, former, current), pack-years of smoking, energy intake using the USDA's HEI, alcohol intake, physical activi…

This is what I was hoping to see from the start. How they accounted for the differences between "sugary soda drinkers" and others. I still don't see how the general attitude of soda drinkers or their level of exercise was evaluated. Perhaps you left out some of the factors mentioned. Still, it seems completely reasonable to ask for more information about the groups before concluding that drinking soda is the cause of shorter telemores.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#245

Post by tatalegma »

hiou wrote: post #96
anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh this thread is going to pull out all the fun ones. Can they program anything to penalize any diet / food topics? Nothing smart is ever said and all the studies are always inconclusive and at best hint at new directions for additional research. Anyhow, to the above comment: http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000011000000000000000.ht... Nutritional studies are worse than physiological studies. It's impossible to co…

Don't forget, the nutrition bloggers (paleo, vegan, etc) will get more fuel for cherry picked blog posts so they can sell more ads, products, newsletter sponsorships, etc.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#246

Post by mkagenius »

danielki wrote: post #98
anigbrowl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Don't be a dick. I was asking a legitimate question because I was curious about the research methodology and, while the study linked in the article had a price tag of $22, the person I replied to seemed to have access to it. Thanks for finding the full text, I will read it when I get home from work (which is why I didn't have time to search for the full text).

Off-topic: Pain in searching with ease, possibly a start up idea.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#247

Post by akgerber »

mikeyouse wrote: post #110
weinzierl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No significant associations were observed between consumption of diet sodas or noncarbonated SSBs and telomere length. I don't understand how the carbonation can have an effect. It's just CO2 and a little bit of H2CO3, neither of which is metabolized.

The results probably vary due to the different classes of beverages, it's not like they make a Coke Zero-Carbonation. I'm actually having a hard time coming up with non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverages as I don't drink any, but I'm picturing stuff like Honest Tea or those Starbucks Frappuccino things.

"Juice Drink" e.g. http://www.welchs.com/products/chillers-juice-drinks, sweetened teas, and lemonade are pretty common. Hawaiian Punch is available in many soda machines.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#248

Post by squiguy7 »

npsimons wrote: post #230
squiguy7 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that some of the drinks are also caffeinated, many people drink them as an alternative to coffee or tea. In this sense they can become addictive.

I've never really gotten this - it's like smoking crack as an alternative to cigarettes. Tea and coffee actually have other things in them that are good for you, and you don't have to add sugar or cream to them, so there is no reason to drink soda for the caffeine.

I agree completely. I drink coffee and tea regularly and haven't had a drop of soda for years.

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#249

Post by gwern »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #242
gwern wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They actually adjusted for age, smoking (never, former, current), pack-years of smoking, energy intake using the USDA's HEI, alcohol intake, physical activity (some/none), BMI, and waist circumference. All of which are self-reports (food and energy intake as a self-report, when it's well known in the field that self-reports are flattering? and you have the gall to imply that this is good reliable science) or based…

Healthy user bias based on confounding factors I can understand between people who do not drink fizzy drinks and those who do. However I would not expect it to then give a clear linear link between specific consumption and telomere length as shown in this study, as the confounding factors are unlikely to be directly linked to exactly how much you consume: "we found that each daily 8-ounce serving of sugar-sweetened s…

> However I would not expect it to then give a clear linear link

No, that's also consistent with healthy user bias: drinking soda and healthy attitudes/habits are not binary variables, they both seem like they would be relatively continuous (you can drink 1 can of soda a day, or 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or anywhere in between for that matter; and you can be very concerned and conscientious about your life, or concerned, or somewhat concerned, or a little concerned), and so you would expect dose-response relationships. There's no less reason to expect linearity from soda/health than soda/telomeres.

(If it was as easy as all that to refute healthy user bias and other confounds, they wouldn't be such a big deal...)

Re: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking

#250

Post by dang »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #236
mikeyouse wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't though. Something tells me green-account "Scientist007", that you might not actually be a scientist.

No, you have got it all wrong. They must surely be a secret-agent-scientist. That's why nobody understand them. They are using secret-science learned at spy-school that nobody else knows about.

Please avoid posting comments that lower the signal-noise ratio in HN threads.
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