Coca-Cola and Pepsi Contribute to Nearly 200,000 Deaths Yearly!

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Coca-Cola and Pepsi Contribute to Nearly 200,000 Deaths Yearly!

October 21st, 2015

Awake Goy

Sugary drinks such as Coke and Pepsi kill nearly 200,000 people per year
worldwide, according to a study conducted by researchers from Tufts University and published in the journal Circulation. ~ David Gutierrez

The numbers are based on prior studies showing that sugar consumption can lead to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

“Many
countries in the world have a significant number of deaths occurring
from a single dietary factor – sugar-sweetened beverages,” senior author
Dariush Mozaffarian said.

“It should be a global priority to substantially reduce or eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages from the diet,”

The study’s abstract was previously presented at the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention in 2013.

U.S. has one of highest death rates

The
study is the first to take a detailed look at the global health impact
of consuming beverages sweetened with sugar.

It focused exclusively on
any sodas, fruit drinks, sports drinks, energy drinks, teas or homemade
drinks sweetened with some form of sugar and containing at least 50
calories per 8-ounce serving.

Due to its different nutrient content, 100
percent fruit juice (not artificially sweetened) was excluded from the
study.

The researchers used 62 separate dietary surveys conducted
on a total of 611,971 people in 51 countries between 1980 and 2010 to
estimate sugar consumption country-by-country.

They combined this with
data on how available sugar is in 187 different countries, in order to
calculate variation in sugar consumption both between and within countries.

Drawing
on prior studies delineating the health effects of consuming
sugar-sweetened beverages, the researchers determined the effect that
the sugar consumption they had calculated would have on death
rates from cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.

They concluded
that in 2010 alone, sugar-sweetened beverages killed 6,450 people from
cancer, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease and 133,000 from diabetes,
for a total of nearly 185,000 deaths.

Although
76 percent of the deaths from sugar-sweetened drinks occurred in
middle- and low-income countries, the United States came in second among
the 20 most populous countries in terms of per-capita deaths, at 125
per million adults. It was surpassed only by Mexico, which had 405
deaths per million adults.

“This is not complicated,” Mozaffarian
said. “There are no health benefits from sugar-sweetened beverages, and
the potential impact of reducing consumption is saving tens of
thousands of deaths each year.”

Sugar among top killers

The findings follow a recent scorching editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine,
in which scientists accused the fast food industry of using the Big
Tobacco playbook to distract people from the lethality of their
products.

Specifically, the authors referred to a study showing that for
every 150 calories from sugar present in a country’s diet, type 2
diabetes rates increase elevenfold.

According to another recent study in
the Lancet, poor diet causes more disease than smoking, alcohol and physical inactivity combined.

According to the Tufts
study, the United States suffers 25,000 deaths per year directly
attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages.

This is nearly the same as
the 30,000 to 40,000 people killed in automobile crashes each year
(according to a recent study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety,
1,600 of those deaths are caused just by distracted teenage drivers).

Contrast
these very real killers with the diseases portrayed as major threats in
media reports. Only 20 people died from whooping cough (pertussis) in
the United States in 2012, the most deadly year since 1955.

There has
been just a single measles death since 2003 (even prior to vaccination,
measles killed only 500 a year). While the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention likes to claim that 36,000 people per year die
from the flu, data from the National Vital Statistics System actually
place the true number at closer to 500.

Source

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