A new study reveals that drinking soda will age you as much as smoking. It makes your cells age faster.
Drinking sugar-sweetened soda daily may age you as much as smoking, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study was conducted on 5, 309 adults between the age of 20-65. All the adults were perfectly healthy before and had no history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
The doctors compared the cells of people who drink soda daily and those who don’t drink any type of soda. Every participant had to drink average amout of 12 ounces sugar-sweetened soda daily, but 21 percent of participants were consuming at least 20 ounces pre day.
And here’s the really interesting part: People who drank a 20-ounce soda every day experienced an additional 4.6 years of telomere aging—the same amount observed in smokers. Telomeres are the protective units of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes in cells; they shorten and fail to regenerate as we age naturally, although there are certain behaviors, such as smoking, that shorten them prematurely.
“Drinking an 8-ounce daily serving of soda corresponded to 1.9 years of additional aging, and drinking a daily 20-ounce serving was linked to 4.6 more years of aging,” Mandy Oaklander reported for TIME. The scary news is that this “effect on telomere length is comparable to the effect of smoking.” (UCSF)
Elissa Epel, PhD and senior study author, explains:
“This is the first demonstration that soda is associated with telomere shortness. This finding held regardless of age, race, income, and education level. Telomere shortening starts long before disease onset… It is possible that soda consumption is associated with telomere shortening in children, too.”
This is the reason why you should stop drinking soda. Soda has already been linked to metabolic syndrome, heart diseases, obesity, and diabetes. Instead of soda you can drink water or natural fruit juices.
Researchers did not find the same effects in those who drank 100 percent fruit juice.
