SSB – Sugar sweetened beverages
ASB- Artificially sweetened beverages
Study and editorial published in Circulation last week:
2 large studies – 37 716 men from the Health Professional’s Follow-up study and 80647 women from the Nurses’ Health study who were free from chronic diseases at baseline. 3.7 million person-years of follow up.
SSB showed higher risk of cardiovascular and cancer mortality. ASB showed higher risk of cardiovascular mortality.
Quoting verbatim from the accompanying editorial:
So where do we go from here? Rather than generating more data on the adverse effects of SSBs, we need to move on to the harder task and aim to make greater strides in understanding what the motivation is for choosing SSBs despite knowledge of the risks. We need to go out of our comfort zones and partner more closely with our behavioral colleagues. We need to develop new approaches to understand what drives the choice of SSBs. These new understandings may be transferable to other areas of adverse health behaviors, or they may be unique to SSB.
At this point, that is not important. What is important is that we have identified a problem, and we need to focus a concerted effort on fixing it permanently.