Heart Disease :: Drinking more than one soft drink daily raises heart disease risks

Drinking more than one soft drink daily ? whether it?s regular or diet ? may be associated with an increase in the risk factors for heart disease, revealed by researchers.

The study published by Framingham researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Prior studies linked soft drink consumption to multiple risk factors for heart disease. However, this study showed that association not only included drinking regular calorie-laden soft drinks, but artificially sweetened diet sodas as well, researchers said.

?Moderation in anything is the key,? said Ravi Dhingra, M.D., lead author of the study and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. ?If you are drinking one or more soft drinks a day, you may be increasing your risk of developing metabolic risk factors for heart disease.?

The Framingham study included nearly 9,000 person observations made in middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times.

In a ?snapshot in time? at baseline, the researchers found that individuals consuming one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent increased prevalence of the metabolic syndrome compared to those consuming less than one soft drink daily.

In a longitudinal study of participants who were free of metabolic syndrome at baseline (6,039 person observations), consumption of one or more soft drinks a day was associated with a 44 percent higher risk of developing new-onset metabolic syndrome during a follow-up period of four years.

The researchers also observed that compared to participants who drank less than one soft drink daily, those who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a:

31 percent greater risk of developing new-onset obesity (defined as a body mass index [BMI] of 30 kilograms/meter2 or more);
30 percent increased risk of developing increased waist circumference;
25 percent increased risk of developing high blood triglycerides or high fasting blood glucose;
32 percent higher risk of having low HDL levels.


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