Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/soft-drinks-are-not-good-for-y.html
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HEALTH TIP: Coke doesn’t count as a “soft drink” if you add rum.
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You could also make a “Cuba Under Embargo” vs a “Cuba Libre” and leave the coke out.
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I was coming to say two things…
- in other news water is wet.
and
- The occasional Diet Coke and vodka gets a pass!!! I’d throw rum in there too, maybe a jack and coke. Really you arent having the “soft drink” so much as just using it as a substitute for simple syrup
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And for minors, you can serve lime juice and call it a virgin “Cuba Under Embargo”.
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You’ll have to pry my Diet Coke from my cold, dead hands.
Which apparently will be sooner than later.
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Soft drinks are not good for you
Roger That!
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The problem with summaries of the summary is, without access to the actual paper due to paywalls, you don’t get the whole story.
From an email with one of the paper authors:
“We have no prevailing hypothesis for the relationship we observed,” said Neil Murphy, PhD, corresponding author of the study, in an email to The American Journal of Managed Care ® . “It is possible that this result is spurious. Additional epidemiological and experimental studies are now required to investigate this association further.”
People who consumed a larger number of soft drinks tended to be younger, be current smokers, and more likely to be physically active. “Other studies in the US have found similarly to us that higher consumers of soft drinks tended to be younger and current smokers. In contrast to these studies, we found that high soft drink consumers were more likely to be physically active,” said Murphy.
So, this study, like many others, finds a correlation between folks who drink soft drinks and an increase in mortality, but they aren’t sure if that’s because soft-drink consumers tend to have lifestyles that lead to a greater incidence of mortality, or is caused by the soft-drinks themselves.
This is especially relevant IMHO because while many folks assume sugar to be the “bad guy” in soft drinks, unsweetened soft drinks show similar issues.
This tends to correlate with my personal hypothesis that soft-drinks are often consumed on-the-go, at fast-food locations, or other places where you are very possibly not eating the healthiest foods in the world at the same time.
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Seems almost counterintuitive to see sugar associated with digestive harm, and fake sugar with circulatory harm.
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This was my first thought as well. It reminds me of the well-touted study that eating a handful of nuts every day is correlated with extended life span, so people started eating more nuts; when a little critical thinking points out that nuts are expensive and the only people who eat a handful of nuts every day WITHOUT that prompting tend to be well-off people with time to exercise and eat high-quality food, and have good healthcare.
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And calories don’t count if you eat them while drinking a diet soda. So, bottoms up either way.
Disclaimer: no scientists were consulted while fabulating this claim.
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Okay then, I’m switching to beer.
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It’s a little disappointing that this study doesn’t mention the impact of corn-syrup in soft drinks. My wife recently contracted Lyme Disease (look out for this - it’s becoming increasingly popular! 
) and has become sensitive to a number of different basic foods. No more tomatoes. No more cheese. Cut the sugar down as low as you can. Easy on the carbohydrates. Recently she ate a can of soup and felt wretched afterwards. “Were there tomates in it?” “No - I checked!” What was in it was Corn-Syrup. In soup!?!?! I assume this was an American recipe. UK firms really do NOT use corn-syrup in anything. One of our American friends only drinks cola in Europe and not in America, because Europe uses sugar and America uses corn-syrup. It tastes very different, she says. And apparently American Chocolate is fermented, they tell me. I’ll stay away from that, too, thanks.
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If you pick an ubiquitous food, filter out study participants with preexisting conditions, you will find that the group not eating the food is healthier. Why? Because it consists of otherwise healthy people with the willpower and resources to avoid an ubiquitous food and this correlates with watching what you eat in general, and this correlates with good health.
While nutrition doesn’t really have a firm grasp on what a good diet is (nutrition research, in general, is a horror-show if you are into stats and experimental methodology), the worst diet is the one where you just sort of eat what’s convenient and around you since that tends to be hyperpalatable dreck with low satiation and high calories. Thus, rigorously applying just about any ruleset for food tends to be better than not doing that. It’s why I think so many people go nuts for the whole ‘no gluten’ thing, honestly. Odds are they aren’t all that sensitive to gluten (baring people with celiac disease whose diets long predate the recent fad), but avoiding it tends to require carefully monitoring what you eat and thinking about it.
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And yet, what landed me in the hospital this year was not due to soft drinks. It was an emergency situation, and I have only vague memory of at least a week, and a different spin of the dice and I could have died.
So whike the study may have validity, other things can do damage too, including getting some rare disease from nobody knows where.r
You can worry endlessly about getting sick, or just live a live without worry, and get seriously sick. It probably doesn’t matter which way, because if something’s coming to get you, it may not matter how much prevention you did. Lots of people have lived healthier than I and died from cancer, yet I seem unable to die, even after a major health issue this year.
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Glad you’re doing better but I’m not sure what your point is?
Saying “studies show X is bad for you” is not the same as saying “if you avoid X you will remain healthy forever.”
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FTFY
additional characters to satisfy the character-count-bot.
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Possibly related to my long-held hypothesis that much of the benefit of various supplements and such is due to the increased water consumption associated with all the pill swallowing.
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But… but how can one contemplate going without fizzy malted battery acid?
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