WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Recently, a team of international researchers analyzed the impact of sugar-sweetened beverages on health, focusing on their contribution to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
Previously, several studies have linked the consumption of sugary drinks to obesity, overweight, and increased risk of heart disease.
The researchers used data from the Global Dietary Database and other authoritative sources, analyzing over 450 dietary surveys. They considered factors like population-level sugary beverage consumption data, optimal intake levels derived from meta-analyses, and the direct and body mass index-mediated effects of sugary drinks on health.
The findings, published in Nature Medicine, revealed that sugary drinks have damaged the health of people of Colombia, Mexico and South Africa with 48 percent of all new diabetes cases in Colombia linked to sugar-sweetened beverages, whereas the same caused one-third of all new diabetes cases in Mexico. Such drinks were connected to 27.6 percent of new diabetes cases and 14.6 percent of cardiovascular disease cases in South Africa.
'We are seeing a rise in the popularity of sugary drinks fueled by influencer culture online. In urban centers, young people are targeted by social media influencers that are paid to promote branded sugary drinks to them, filling an information gap left by the lack of school-based nutrition education,' Dr Catherine Kanari, a non-communicable diseases specialist for Amref Health Africa in Kenya, said.
'Ultimately, a rise in diabetes cases risks straining our health system to beyond its limits.'
Among adults aged 20 years and older, the direct effects of sugar-sweetened beverages played a major role in weight gain and a rise in type 2 diabetes cases.
'Sugar-sweetened beverages are heavily marketed and sold in low- and middle-income nations. Not only are these communities consuming harmful products, but they are also often less well equipped to deal with the long-term health consequences,' Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the paper's authors and director of Tuft's Food is Medicine Institute, noted.
To prevent the increasing risk of such non-communicable diseases, the authors recommended public health interventions and strict policy measures to reduce the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages.
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