Sugary drinks linked to 180,000 annual deaths worldwide

Drinking non-diet sodas, sports drinks, fruit drinks, and other sugar-sweetened beverages could be associated with as many as 180,000 deaths worldwide each year, according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study, presented during the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions, utilized data collected as part of the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases Study to look at the global health impacts of sugar-sweetened beverages. According to that data, sodas and other sugary drinks could be linked to 133,000 diabetes deaths; 44,000 cardiovascular disease-related deaths and 6,000 cancer-related deaths in the year 2010. Of those deaths, 78 percent came in low-to-middle-income countries, not high-income nations. The researchers divided the results into nine different global regions. The most diabetes-related deaths came in the Latin America/Caribbean region, where a reported 38,000 people died as a result of drinking sugar-sweetened beverages. The greatest number of cardiovascular deaths (11,000) originated in the East/Central Eurasia. "Among the world's 15 most populous countries, Mexico - one of the countries with the highest per-capita consumption of sugary beverages in the world - had the highest death rate due to these beverages, with 318 deaths per million adults linked to sugar-sweetened beverage intake," the American Heart Association explained