Soft Drinks & Cancer, Chocolate & Strokes

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Soft Drinks & Cancer, Chocolate & Strokes

Melanie Haiken, Caring.com

Do soft drinks cause pancreatic

cancer? Does chocolate prevent stroke? Two nutrition studies just swept

across the newspapers and airwaves. Did you see them? Here are the

short-and-sweet headline versions:

1. Soda pop causes pancreatic cancer.

2. Chocolate prevents stroke.

These studies got a lot of

attention because these are popular foods. One study warns of a serious

disease we all fear, while the other gives you another reason to eat

something you want to eat anyway. But are they true? To be honest, even

after taking a look at the actual data, I'm still not sure, and I'm not

sure the experts know either. But they make sense and fit with what we

already know about nutrition, so they do make important points.

The Problem with Soda

Most soft drinks are made with highly concentrated sweeteners, like

high-fructose corn sweetener. Even the "healthier" versions made with

good old-fashioned sugar deliver it in a highly concentrated dose. The

job of the pancreas is to secrete insulin when needed to process sugar,

so when you hit your body with a wallop of sugar, the pancreas goes

into overdrive. Experts at the University of Minnesota followed 60,000

people in China and found a link between those who drank large

quantities of soda and the incidence of pancreatic cancer. The

researchers theorize that stressing the pancreas repeatedly with high

doses of sugar leads to inflammation, which in turn sets up a

vulnerability to pancreatic cancer.

Their study found that people who

drank two or more sodas a week had an 87 percent increase in their risk

of developing pancreatic cancer. Since pancreatic cancer is rare, and

the overall risk of developing it is low, even an 87 percent increase

is not as big as it sounds. But pancreatic cancer is a particularly

deadly type of cancer, killing most of those who get it within a few

years. So protecting our pancreas is something we all need to take

seriously.

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