THE WORLD

6
Carbonating the World
four years, they found that weight gain was greatest (about 4.5 kg or 10 pounds)
among women who went from drinking no more than one SSB a week to at least
one a day. 51 Similarly, among roughly 4,000 men and women in the Framingham
Offspring Study, those who consumed at least one soft drink a day had a 35 percent
higher risk of obesity over the next four years, compared to those who drank no soft
drinks. 52
“Would you drink 12 teaspoons of sugar?
Sugar is sweet, diabetes is not.” Billboard
supporting a soda tax in Mexico.
Source: El Poder del Consumidor.
SSBs and Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes used to be called “adult-onset,” but its name was changed when
it began showing up in younger and younger people. It is a particularly diabolical
disease, because, before it kills, it causes blindness, amputations, and other effects.
A recent study conducted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation reported that the prevalence of diabetes worldwide rose by
a remarkable 45 percent between 1990 and 2013. 53 Rising rates of diabetes in both
rich and poor countries are imposing huge health-care costs.
Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California,
San Francisco, charges that sugar drinks are a particularly potent cause of
diabetes. He said, “When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate
of diabetes went up 0.1 percent. But if those 150 calories came from a can
of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 percent. Added sugar is 11 times more
potent at causing diabetes than general calories.” 54
In the Nurses’ Health Study, which tracked more than 90,000 American
women for eight years, those who consumed at least one SSB per day had
an 83 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than
those who consumed less than one SSB per month. 55 Among 43,580 men
and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study, those who consumed
at least two soft drinks a week had a 42 percent higher risk of diabetes
than those who rarely consumed soft drinks. 56 After adjustment for BMI
and calorie intake, the risk was 34 percent higher among those who drank
at least two soft drinks a day (meaning that soft drinks promoted diabetes
by means in addition to increasing body weight). Finally, a meta-analysis,
which included those two studies and six additional ones involving more
than 310,000 people in total, found that people who consumed at least
one to two servings of SSBs per day had a 26 percent higher risk of type 2
diabetes than those who consumed less than one serving per month. 57
SSBs and Cardiovascular Disease
For many years, researchers, especially in the United States, pinned much of
the blame for heart disease on the saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol in
foods. But research both old and new began shining a spotlight on sugar and
sugar drinks as another important cause.