Shocking annual death toll from sugary drinks

Sugary drinks kill you.

Remember that the next time you’d like to suck one down. You’re flirting with your own mortality every time you do. This isn’t speculation. It’s science.

According to a recently released study, scientists have finally quantified the world-wide death toll from sugary drinks. Results were published in the journal Circulation.

Every year, 184,000 adults across the globe die due to the deleterious effects of sugar-laden drinks

Such drinks include fruit juices, sweetened teas, sports drinks, homemade sugary drinks and sugar-sweetened sodas. These impact disabilities and death in relation to diabetes and heart disease, two issues closely tied to mortality.

Though the study could be interpreted as fear-mongering, keep in mind that the data was collected from over 187 countries and includes information on over half a million individuals. The data are further broken down to show that sugary beverages led to 133,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease and 6,450 from cancer.

As cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian of Tufts University explains, there are absolutely no benefits from drinking beverages sweetened with sugar. Simply eliminating these would save tens of thousands of lives every year.

This should serve as a wake-up call to the younger generations already consuming high quantities of such beverages. If they don’t stop now, the damage they’re doing to their bodies currently will only become worse as they age, leading to higher rates of disability and death than the world is seeing now.

Interestingly enough, it’s the low- to middle-income countries suffering the most, making 76% of the deaths relating to sugary drinks. Mexico’s death rate for deaths associated with sugary drinks ranked as the highest in relation to population size, with 24,000, while America comes in second with an estimated 25,000 deaths.

Sources:

Circ.AHAJournals.org

HealthiestBlog.com