“Fizzy drinks ‘kill 180,000 a year'”
“Fizzy drinks ‘kill 180,000 a year’”
Articles in the Daily Mail, The Times (£) and The Sun on Tuesday 30th June claimed that new research shows sugary drinks are to blame for about 184,000 deaths a year worldwide. However, the research is based on assumptions and only uses responses to questionnaires to draw its conclusions.
Tom Sanders, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics, King’s College London
“The study is based on the assumption that sugar causes obesity, which causes type 2 diabetes, which in turn contributes to mortality. It uses questionnaires, notoriously unreliable because of frequent misreporting by participants, and then extrapolates these results to the whole world. More robust research, from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer, using individual sugar intake suggests that high intake of sugary drinks increases relative risk of type 2 diabetes by 0.2. The likely effects of sugar on mortality are tiny compared to those of smoking or alcohol.”
Document type: For The Record
Published: 1 July 2015
Source: Sense About Science
