Soft Drinks Linked To Heart Disease Via Metabolic Syndrome

A new US study has found that drinking more than one soft drink a day, whether regular or diet, may be linked to an increased risk of developing heart disease, via an increase in metabolic syndrome, a group of characteristics like excess girth, high blood pressure, and other factors that increase the chances of getting diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

Other studies have linked drinking soft drinks with risk factors for heart disease, but this study suggests that diet soft drinks sweetened with artificial sweeteners are just as likely to be linked as high calorie drinks sweetened with sugar.

"Moderation in anything is the key.

If you are drinking one or more soft drinks a day, you may be increasing your risk of developing metabolic risk factors for heart disease."

Metabolic syndrome is a group of symptoms such as excess waist circumference, high blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or "good" cholesterol) and high fasting glucose levels. Having three or more of the symptoms increases a person's risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The investigators also found that participants who drank one or more soft drinks a day, when compared to those that drank less, had a number of increased risk factors for metabolic syndrome, including:

• Thirty-one per cent greater risk of developing new-onset obesity (defined as a body mass index or BMI of 30 kilograms per meter squared or higher).

• Thirty percent higher risk of developing an increased waist circumference.

• Twenty-five percent increased risk of developing high blood triglycerides or high fasting blood glucose.

• Thirty-two percent increased risk of having low HDL ("good" cholesterol).

• A trend towards an increased risk of developing high blood pressure, but this was not statistically significant.

Speculating on their findings, perhaps the fructose corn syrup in regular soft drinks causes weight gain, or leads to insulin resistance and diabetes, but if that were the case you would expect to see the link with regular drinks and not with diet drinks. "Our findings suggest this is not the case,"

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that drinking more liquids during a meal tends to make you eat more solids at the next meal. Whereas if you had drunk less and eaten more at the first meal, at the next meal you tend to eat less solids. Drinking more liquids does not compensate to the same extent as eating solids; you feel full at the time, but you are hungrier next time.

Another possibility could be that being used to drinking sweet drinks makes a person more likely to eat sweet things.

And another theory is that the caramel in soft drinks could stimulate the development of complex sugars that result in insulin resistance and cause inflammation, as shown by some experimental studies.

The researchers said it was important to realize that these are just theories, and their study had only found a link between soft drinks and metabolic syndrome, it had not established that one causes the other. They suggested further studies be done to repeat the results and to find out what the underlying mechanisms could be, before recommendations are made about whether people should change their consumption of soft drinks.


Reference: Medical News Today