In “Science Now,” the Los Angeles Times (6/30, Healy) reports that “the consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks appears to claim the lives of about 25,000 American adults yearly and is linked worldwide to the deaths of 180,000 each year,” according to a study published June 29 in the journal Circulation. In particular, “low- and middle-income countries are bearing the brunt of the death toll attributed to overconsumption of sugar-sweetened sodas, sports drinks and fruit drinks.”
The Washington Post (6/30, Gebelhoff) “To Your Health” blog points out that “overall…one in every 100 deaths from obesity-related diseases is [caused] by sugary beverages.” Tufts University researchers “found that the beverages would be responsible for 133,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease and 6,450 from cancer.” Researchers arrived at these conclusions after gathering “data on deaths and disabilities from 2010,” then calculating “the direct effect that sugar-sweetened beverages had on public health based on dietary surveys reaching more than 600,000 people.”
The NBC News (6/30, Carroll) website reports that Mexico “had the highest rate of deaths related to sugary beverages, with an estimated 405 deaths per million adults (24,000 total deaths) and the United States had the second highest.” The study authors theorized that “the high consumption of sugar sweetened beverages in Mexico and in Latin American countries could be due to problems finding safe drinking water.”
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