Dear Editor,
The article I am sharing with Solomon Islander’s readers today carries a strong message about the health risks in drinking “sugar sweetened beverages.”
The worst drinks for blood sugar control are the drinks containing the greatest amount of sugar, also known as “sugar-sweetened beverages”. And the drinks that contain the greatest amount of sugar are sodas, blended soda drinks, and sweet tea.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s not even complicated nutrition science. Consuming a lot of sugar regularly leads to these bona fide killers: heart disease, many cancers, and diabetes. It’s an easy concept to grasp.
A scientific analysis of data derived from following the health of more than 90,000 female nurses for eight years found that nurses who said they drank one or more servings of soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) a day were twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as women who rarely drank SSBs. That’s extremely telling.
The paper, entitled “Sugar-Sweetened Beverages, Weight Gain, and Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in Young and Middle-Aged Women,” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was written by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, one of whom was Walter Willet, MD, a renowned professor of epidemiology, nutrition, and medicine, who had this to say about sugar, obesity, and chronic diseases like diabetes:
“We are in the middle of an epidemic of overweight and obesity. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Soda and other sugary beverages are one of the main factors fueling the epidemic of obesity,” he says.
Willet goes on to say that obesity leads directly to an increased risk of heart disease, many cancers, and type 2 diabetes and that diabetes is often a prelude to frightening complications like kidney failure, blindness, heart disease, and amputation
Coca-Cola
Make no mistake; if you have a 20-ounce bottle of Coke in your hand, you’re going to drink the whole thing even though you could have selected the 12-ounce can. Either way, it’s one serving of sugary liquid. The 20-ouncer packs 65 grams of added sugar and 240 calories.
Frank Short
Bangkok
