I don’t drink sweetened beverages. Fortunately, I stopped over 20 years ago when a friend asked me a simple question, “Would you take a bath in soda?”
“Of course not, I replied.”
“That’s what you’re doing to your entire body internally, every time you drink one. You’re bathing your cells with soda instead of water.”
I may have had a few since then, usually less than a full one a year. Then the changes-adding high fructose corn syrup, occurred, which made drinking them even worse.
For years we know that daily consumption is linked with obesity, type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, increased risk of heart disease, and more.
A recent study conducted in Sweden for 10 years followed 32,575 women aged 49-83 and 35,884 men aged 45-79 y without cardiovascular disease, cancer, or diabetes at the beginning of the study.
The consumption of sweetened beverages, including sugar–sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks and juice drinks, was assessed by using a food–frequency questionnaire.
They found, through reviewing public records ascertained 3510 incident cases of stroke, including 2588 cerebral infarctions, 349 intracerebral hemorrhages (bleeding in the brain), 156 subarachnoid hemorrhages (bleeding between the brain and the skull), and 417 unspecified strokes.
Stroke cases were ascertained by linkage to the Swedish Inpatient Register and the Swedish Cause of Death Register.
The study determined that sweetened beverage consumption was significantly positively associated with risk of total stroke and cerebral infarction but not with hemorrhagic stroke.
Source: Sweetened Beverage Consumption Is Associated with Increased Risk of Stroke in Women and Men