You Can Still Get Cancer From Soda, Even If Everything Else You Do Is Healthy

At this point, I'm pretty sure there are literally no positive side effects of drinking soda. Not only is it horrible for your teeth, but it's also linked to diabetes and weight gain.

And if you ask me, getting a "sugar rush" from soda doesn't compare to the natural energy you can get from tea or coffee. (Yeah, sure, we can have the coffee debate later.)

New research from Sweden suggests people who regularly drink sugary beverages (not just drinks that contain cancer-linked aspartame), can double your risk of getting rare forms of gallbladder or binary tract cancers.

Since we've known for a long time heavy soda consumption can lead to obesity and high blood pressure, researchers hypothesized it could also lead to the diseases associated with these early on-set problems.

For over 13 years, researchers monitored the food and drink intake of 70,000 participants. Only 150 developed biliary tract or gallbladder cancers.

Butttttt... according to Reuters,

Compared with people who avoided sugar-sweetened drinks altogether, individuals who consumed two or more juice drinks or sodas, including artificially sweetened sodas, a day had more than twice the risk of developing gallbladder tumors and 79 percent higher odds of getting biliary tract cancer.

This news is different from previous studies because, though other studies have found sporadic links between sugary drink consumption and biliary tract cancers, this is the first to provide consistent evidence to back up the claims.

So what if you're the sparkling image of health in every other aspect of your life, and literally the only unhealthy thing you do is drink sodas?

Well, the study also proves this is likely untrue. Just like eating your meals in front of a television often leads to weight gain, drinking tons of soda almost always leads to other bad habits.

Reuters notes,

The people who drank two or more sodas or sugary beverages a day were more likely to be overweight and eat a higher-calorie diet with more sugar and carbohydrates and less protein and fat.

More so, even after overweight participants were separated from those with normal BMIs, the risk remained the same.

Of course, you can still argue there is not enough evidence to prove there's a direct link, but like cigarettes, more than one study against anything is enough to convince me I should just stay away from it.

Citations: New Study Says Soda Can Cause Rare Types Of Cancers (Cosmopolitan), Soda and other sweet drinks tied to risk for some rare cancers (Reuters)