Reaching for a soda or sweetened iced tea every day might be doing more harm. than most people realise. A new long-term study has found that drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily is linked to more than double the risk of developing gastric, or stomach, cancer.
The research comes from the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute. Scientists tracked over 112,000 adults for several decades using data from two major long-running U.S. health studies — the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Over the course of the follow-up, 278 participants went on to develop gastric cancer.
The numbers were striking. People who drank at least one sugary beverage a day had roughly 2.45 times the risk of gastric cancer compared to those who almost never touched them — less than once a month. The link held for both men and women. Among women in the Nurses’ Health Study specifically, drinking more than one sugary beverage daily pushed the risk even higher, to about three times that of infrequent drinkers.
Fructose appeared to be a common factor. The more of it participants consumed overall, the greater their likelihood of developing the disease. Diet drinks, however, showed a different pattern: artificially sweetened beverages did not show the same link once researchers accounted for other lifestyle factors.
“This is the first study to demonstrate an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and gastric cancer in a US population,” said Dr Andrew T. Chan, the study’s senior author and a gastroenterologist, with Mass General Brigham. He pointed out that gastric cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, yet very little has been known about how everyday dietary choices might contribute to it.
About 65% of American adults drink at least one sugary beverage daily, which makes these findings particularly difficult to ignore. Still, the researchers are careful to note that this is an observational study — it shows a strong association, not direct proof that sugary drinks cause stomach cancer. More research will be needed to unpack exactly why the link exists and what’s happening at a biological level.
For now, though, it is another reason to think twice before that daily can of soda.
(Journal: Gastro Hep Advances)