Another week, another reason to cut back on not just sugar, but on sugar alternatives like those included in diet drinks. Too much sugar, including sugar alternatives (erythritol, aspartame, etc.), increases the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammation, higher pain levels, depression, cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, stroke, kidney stones, heart attack, metabolic syndrome, and more. Now there is information linking diet drinks with atrial fibrillation-irregular heartbeat- commonly referred to as A-Fib.
The study analyzed data from over 200,000 people from the UK Biobank biomedical database and was published in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. The researchers found that drinking two liters or more per week of artificially sweetened beverages, the equivalent of a medium-sized fast-food diet soda a day, raised the risk of an irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) by 20% when compared to people who drank none.
Drinking a similar number of added-sugar beverages raised the risk of the condition by 10%, while drinking about four ounces of pure, unsweetened juices, such as orange or vegetable juice, was associated with an 8% lower risk of atrial fibrillation, the study found.
Atrial fibrillation is an irregular and often very rapid heart rhythm which in the long-term, can lead to complications including:
- Blood clot formation in the heart
- Dislocation of blood clot from heart to other organs such as lungs or brain
- Stroke
- Heart failure
- Chronic fatigue
- Other heart problems
- Abnormal or reduced blood supply to organs
Atrial fibrillation can also “increase the risk for heart attack, for dementia, for kidney disease. All of those things are likely long-term risks,” said Dr. Gregory Marcus, professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and associate chief of cardiology for research at UCSF Health.
While the study could only show an association between sweetened drinks and A-fib, the relationship remained after accounting for any genetic susceptibility to the condition.
“Our study’s findings cannot definitively conclude that one beverage poses more health risk than another due to the complexity of our diets and because some people may drink more than one type of beverage,” said lead study author Dr. Ningjian Wang, a professor at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.
“However, based on these findings, we recommend that people reduce or even avoid artificially sweetened and sugar-sweetened beverages whenever possible,” Wang said in the statement. “Do not take it for granted that drinking low-sugar and low-calorie artificially sweetened beverages is healthy, it may pose potential health risks.”
You can read more about how consuming a high amount of sugar impacts your health in the posts below:
-https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/atrial-fibrillation/symptoms-causes/syc-20350624
-https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/condition/Atrial-fibrillation/hp-Atrial-fibrillation?source=conditioncdx
-https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/
-https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/05/health/diet-and-sugary-drinks-atrial-fibrillation-wellness/index.html