Quick list the things that increase your risk of heart disease ! heart disease spoon
Bet bad genes, smoking, boozing, not moving, being overweight and eating saturated fat i.e. meat, full cream milk, eggs etc made it onto the list. Did Coca Cola and other sugar sweetened beverages make it ?
Probably not. But it should !
It just takes one a day
Research published in the journal, Circulation, shows men who drink just one sugar loaded cold drink a day, increase their chances of heart disease by 20 %.
The researchers reached this staggering conclusion, after pouring through the stats of 42 883 men who are part of the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
The Health Professionals Follow-Up study is a study which has been running for over 20 years. It started in 1986, when men, mainly white, over the age of 40, working in health related professions were signed up. The health behaviours of these guys has been scrutinized through a comprehensive questionnaire and measuring of a host of heart health biomarkers every two years, since then.
Cold drinks are to blame
Heart disease is definitely multi-factorial, so finding things to blame is complicated. Heart disease spoon
To hone in on the role cool drinks might be playing on heart disease risk, the researchers played with the numbers, so that the impact of the regular culprits was accounted for.
In the end, they found sugar sweetened beverages were definitely a contributing factor.
It was a sugar effect, since the guys who were sipping down artificially sweetened drinks didn’t register the same bad numbers.
And the more the guys were sipping, the bigger the blow to the biomarkers. Both triglyceride and C-reactive protein levels were high and high-density lipoproteins (HDL) levels were lower, in the big drinkers.
Coke does not ADD LIFE
These kinds of studies are only able to show patterns, they can’t really PROVE anything.
But, the writing is on the wall – drinking sugary beverages is not adding quite as much life as we’re been led to believe – they’re also implicated in metabolic syndrome and gout.
Cut it down not out
The study highlighted that the problem is a quantity issue. The guys in HEART TROUBLE were drinking a cold drink a day, those who drank one or two a week were fine.
Add to your life, by enjoying an ice cold cool drink on special occasions, not every day.
PS. If you’re a cool drink junkie i.e. you feel there is no life, without a fizzy cool drink, opt for calorie free options. They may not be perfect but at least you won’t have to run on a treadmill for 50 minutes to use up the calories.
Sweetened Beverage Consumption, Incident Coronary Heart Disease and Biomarkers of Risk in Men. Circulation (2012) Lawrence de Koning, Vasanti S. Malik, Mark D. Kellogg, Eric B. Rimm, Walter C. Willett, and Frank B. Hu.Interested in learning more about the chemistry behind the foods you’re eating ?
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Further reading
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| Your lifestyle turns the lights off in your heart | High insulin levels hammer your heart whether you’re thirteen or thirty | Juicing up is fattening up |
The 7 Big Spoons™…. are master switches that turn health on.
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| Balance Eicosanoids | Rein in insulin | Dial down stress | Sleep ! | Increase Vit D | Culivate microflora | Think champion |
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My name is Dr Sandy Evans, I am a modern day alchemist, trained as a pharmacologist, I love to help people use chemicals to produce gold performances.