Soda Pop Damages Your Cells' Telomeres

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.

Comments

Overly broad?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Overly broad?

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:Overly broad?

[CanarDuck]

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/ )

Re:Overly broad?

[AthanasiusKircher]

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!

Re:'Regardless of... income and education level' ?

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.