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Soda Pop Damages Your Cells' Telomeres

Posted by timothy on from the you-can't-just-stretch-them-back-into-place? dept.

BarbaraHudson writes Those free soft drinks at your last start-up may come with a huge hidden price tag. The Toronto Sun reports that researchers at the University of California — San Francisco found study participants who drank pop daily had shorter telomeres — the protective units of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes in cells — in white blood cells. Short telomeres have been associated with chronic aging diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The researchers calculated daily consumption of a 20-ounce pop is associated with 4.6 years of additional biological aging. The effect on telomere length is comparable to that of smoking, they said. "This finding held regardless of age, race, income and education level," researcher Elissa Epel said in a press release.

11 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Overly broad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can they be a little more specific as to what it is that's in the soda that is causing this?

    1. Re:Overly broad? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Can they be a little more specific as to what it is that's in the soda that is causing this?

      Nope, it's only an observation. No causation at all. And, of course, without any useful info from TFA, one can't tell if this is just another crap study done by some medical student or something with a degree of actual thought behind it. Off to see if the 'American Journal of Public Health' is accessible.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Overly broad? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd go with 'no' and 'no'. Yes, the end goal is to discover the cause, the mechanism, and the effect as precisely as possible; but the universe of possibilities is absurdly gigantic, easily larger than you could ever afford to study.

      So what do you do? You start by trying to cut the search space into more manageable chunks with this sort of study, which doesn't provide the level of precision you ultimately want; but can (relatively) cheaply and easily provide some leads on what is worth looking at in greater detail and what isn't.

    3. Re:Overly broad? by kwiqsilver · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Is it real sugar or HFCS?

      I've seen other studies that claim a much stronger link between HFCS and diabetes than between cane sugar and diabetes.

    4. Re:Overly broad? by LordLimecat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have never seen any study suggesting that, except the single widely ridiculed Yale study. Not surprising given how nearly identical sucrose and HFCS are in the gut.

    5. Re:Overly broad? by CanarDuck · · Score: 5, Insightful
      A p-value of 0.04? This is a rather meager statistical significance. Mark me skeptical until the study has been reproduced independently.

      For all I know they might have been looking at a lot of different nutrition factors and only reported those which appeared significant after the experiment (obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/882/ )

    6. Re:Overly broad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Agreed. Most of the soft drinks I've seen have somewhere around 35-40g of sugar! That's a shitload and people slam these things down like it's water. Any parent who allows their children to have soft drinks on any kind of regular basis should be charged with child abuse.

    7. Re:Overly broad? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Troll much?

      I normally wouldn't even bother to respond to this, but I just want to be sure no mods are confused.

      And here's another study that's not from Yale and doesn't use a red herring to confuse people.

      And yet that's precisely what you are doing: introducing a red herring, actually the specific one I addressed in my post, namely:

      HFCS != pure fructose

      Your study is about consumption of pure fructose. Metabolism of fructose by itself has been shown in numerous studies to be very different from how human metabolism deals with a mixture of sugars, particularly the 50/50 mixture of fructose and glucose found in honey, HFCS, and sucrose (the latter after the one main bond in sucrose is broken up very early in digestion).

      And yes, eating a lot of fructose by itself seems to do weird things to metabolism. But, ya know, mixtures make a difference.

      What gives you two away as shills is that you use strong, unscientific words.

      Yes, "shill" isn't a strong word or anything. Look -- you have one study that's not even on the substance in question. I referred to a metastudy which considered a multitude of research on the actual topic and talked about the current scientific consensus.

      I think HFCS is bad, but mainly because its use is propped up by crappy agricultural policy that supports growing too much corn for no apparent reason other than stupid lobbying. I also think HFCS consumed in excess is bad, just like consuming too much sucrose or honey or whatever.

      If you know how to use PubMed, then you can't play up ignorance as an excuse.

      Funny, given your ignorance of the actual substance to be studied seems to have determined your choice of citations.

      Go tell your bosses at Coca-Cola or wherever that we're not buying it.

      Yeah, the overall message of my previous post was -- excess sugar consumption in general is bad for you, i.e., even the Coke with cane sugar is crap, even if it doesn't have HFCS. I obviously must be a shill for an industry trying to sell sugary products with my whole "we need to consume less sugar" posts....

      Cheers!

    8. Re:Overly broad? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Full disclosure: I just read the full study I linked to in my first post. At the conclusion of the article, the first author does declare that his research was in part funded by lobbyists. I didn't read this full study until now, which I only found this evening when writing my first post -- but it came up in the top hits in a search for "HFCS vs. sugar" and its abstract agreed well with what I've researched myself over the years.

      So, I don't know what to say about that -- but once I noticed that, I'm coming clean and noting there was a conflict of interest with one of the two authors.

      On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time in the past trying to sort through these issues, and I've come to similar conclusions as those expressed in this article. So, it sort of pains me to be somewhat in agreement with research funded by corn growers. But, once again, let me reiterate my feeling that HFCS is way overused, the excess sugar/HFCS thrown into all sorts of processed foods is a bad thing, and I wish the U.S. government would stop subsidies manipulating agriculture in bad ways (like supporting the corn lobby).

      But none of this means that HFCS is so much more evil than table sugar. It's just overproduced and overused, as most sugars are these days. Obesity has risen as more "hidden sugar" has been put into more products, and HFCS has partly enabled that... that's the evil (if there is one), not some sort of weird metabolic effects so much different from sucrose or whatever.

      Anyhow, downmod me and my posts if you feel it's necessary. I really was just looking for a recent study on the topic, and despite the conflict of interest, I think the article is mostly a pretty accurate assessment of the literature. (And there are other studies, some of them cited in the article, which don't have conflicts of interest and come to supporting conclusions.)

  2. Re:'Regardless of... income and education level' ? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My bullshit meter always starts kicking into life when the hyperbole starts flowing, like the reading comprehension or random amount of payment received having a causative effect on the function of an organic process.

    Well, the other things that are mentioned here were age and race, which could conceivably have biological differences that could have an effect.

    I suspect that income and education level could be relevant here as a proxy for other dietary trends. People with higher incomes tend to eat better quality food overall than poor people. People with higher education levels also tend to make different dietary choices (and are probably more likely to seek out more "natural" foods or whatever the current research is pointing toward).

    So, it's not so much that these aspects are causative as that they are indicative of perhaps a wider variety of potential dietary choices. This study seems to be based on general survey data, so it's not clear that they could rule out various confounding factors, though I'd have to read the study to know for certain.

    Showing the trend is consistent is at least a step toward confronting a rather obvious objection that could come up if they only looked at poor folks whose diet is already likely to have a bunch of bad junk in it (and who probably tend to consume the most soda). If they see the same effect in rich, educated folks who drink soda, then it may not be a general "poor disease" issue. (Medical studies have often been plagued by these problems if they only have subjects who are not representative of the general population.)

    I'm just guessing here, but that's one reason I could imagine for mentioning this.

  3. Re:'Regardless of... income and education level' ? by cas2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    spoilt white boys often have a huge chip on their shoulder and are obsessed with denying their priviledge. it's why they make absurd strawmen and rant about them at any opportunity, regardless of whether it's relevant in context or not.

    i.e. "white boys burden".

    this particular spoilt white boy seems to be suffering from the idiotic meme that white males are really the oppressed victims in modern society.