Metabolic Syndrome: Are Diet Drinks Responsible?

All this while, the bad egg when it comes to food habits responsible for the epidemic-like spread of obesity, heart ailments, and diabetes has been the fat-rich diet that most of America follows. Now, researchers are wondering if they have stumbled upon a link between soft drinks and diseases like heart ailments, diabetes, and obesity, together called metabolic syndrome.

Americans consume huge amounts of soda. The numbers for last year itself are staggering – 814 servings of eight ounces each. This is a jump of 24 percent over the last two decades. The Europeans, in comparison, drank only 461 servings of soda in the year 2006.

In fact, soda seems to be the single biggest liquid product being gulped down across America. Surprisingly, it outdid even beer. The number of beers drunk stood at 349 servings. Bottled water came in next at 336 servings, while milk and coffee brought up the rear with 312 and 261, respectively, for the same period.

According to a study carried in Circulation, a journal, daily soda drinkers have a 44 percent more increased health risk than people who don’t drink soda. This is regardless of whether the soda is regular or diet.

Whether this is true or not is still being highly contested. There are doctors who are of the opinion it is not the soda so much as the other factors working in tandem – eating fried foods and leading a sedentary lifestyle, for instance – that cause a person to develop the illnesses stated.

There were also people from the research domain who say all such findings become void when you consider the risk entailed with diet soft drinks. There were some others who felt the work done in this area was not sufficient to draw conclusions from.

According to the senior author of the paper, Ramachandran Vasan from the Boston University School of Medicine, the type of soda – regular or diet – seemed inconsequential as far as the results were concerned. Vasan found the results to be totally consistent, something he found amazing.

The results are surprising, especially because diet sodas are actually recommended by the American Heart Association for consumption by people eating at fast food joints. In a statement, the association declared the possibility of numerous other factors, such as the consumption of high calorie foods, contributing to the possibility of disease, and not the diet sodas themselves.

The American Beverage Association, a group representing the soda makers, also lent its voice to this line of thought, calling the idea of diet sodas causing heart disease and other ailments hard to believe. This is because diet sodas have no calories. They basically contain water (99%) and some flavor, according to Susan Neely, president of the organization.

According to Dean Ornish, who works at the University of California, San Francisco, as a researcher and a cardiologist, nothing could even remotely explain how metabolic syndrome could be associated with diet sodas.

He said no single item – food, exercise, or drink – could be called the cause for these diseases. Metabolic syndrome is usually a result of a combination of two or more such factors.

The new study has, for what it is worth, managed to polarize the different entities involved into two groups. It remains to be seen which group will be able to provide the more accurate information in this regard.