Step away from the soda, says biologist: Fizzy drinks can cause permanent weight gain

Good news for the Bloomberg campaign against big sugary drinks. New study says frequent consumption could lead to lasting metabolic damage.

 By Meena Hart Duerson / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 7:24 PM

 A British biologist has a message for soda lovers: step away from the fizz!

Dr. Hans-Peter Kubis, the director of the Health Exercise and Rehabilitation group at Bangor University in England, has found that regularly drinking soda can not only cause weight gain but can actually change the metabolism in the human body, potentially triggering a whole host of other medical problems.

“If you’re thirsty and think of reaching for a sugary soft drink - don’t - it can compromise your long-term health,” the University warned in a statement publicizing Kubis’s findings.

His study, published in the European Journal of Nutrition in June, looked at the effects of increased soda intake on a group of 11 men and women described as “lightly active, healthy, lean subjects with sporadic soft drink consumption.”

This group was given sugar-sweetened beverages over a course of four weeks while researchers kept track of their vitals.

The study found that even in that short time, the extra soda led their bodies to process calories differently, switching to “an inefficient metabolism.”

“Regularly drinking soft drinks changes the way our muscles use food as fuel, making them prefer to burn sugars over fats,” researchers found, noting the research indicated “these changes are lasting.
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Why Is Type 1 Diabetes Rising Worldwide?

Why Is Type 1 Diabetes Rising Worldwide?

• By Maryn McKenna
• January 26, 2012

We’ve gotten sadly accustomed by now to warnings about obesity and its effect on health: joint damage, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and its complications such as blindness and amputation. We almost take for granted that as obesity increases worldwide, diabetes will also, and it is. That is, type 2 diabetes — the kind that is linked to obesity and used to be called adult-onset diabetes — is rising as obesity does.

But here’s a puzzle: Type 1 diabetes — the autoimmune disease that begins in childhood and used to be called juvenile-onset diabetes — is rising too, around the globe, at 3 percent to 5 percent per year. And at this point, no one can quite say why.


I have a column in the February Scientific American, on newsstands now and live on the web, exploring this conundrum. There is a raft of researchers exploring the issue, but so far there is only one thing they can say for sure: The increase, which began in the 1950s and accelerated in about the 1980s, is happening too fast to be due solely to genetic change. Something in the environment is driving the increase. But what?   READ MORE