Soft Drinks & Cancer, Chocolate & Strokes

Brought to you by The Best Years in Life Beating and Avoiding Cancer

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.

For the rest of the article click Here.