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

Anger really can kill you: Study

"Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said. Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood. "It's definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. "Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart," Lampert said"