Drinking too many sugary soft drinks can accelerate how quickly our cells age, a new study suggests.
Trongphu/Wikimedia Commons
20 comments:
Julianna
said...
WOW! I had no idea that soft drinks speed up aging! It is amazing how 1.9 extra years are added to your age, if you drink 8 ounces of sweetened soda daily! It took a lot of work to figure that fact out, and I am impressed. Leung's team must have worked 24/7 to figure out what they wanted to figure out. But I still can not believe soda speeds up aging! Science is very cool! LIFE IS COOL! I can't wait to learn more!
This is one of the hard-commitment things. I am going to tell my mom to stop drinking two cans of Coke every day. Seriously. I am going to throw away my soda. One second...
OK I am back. A regular coke is 12 oz. Approx, that is 2 years of aging. My cells would be twelve! And if I drank two cans, my cells would be weaker and older. That is just amazing. Also, it's cool that marriage and smoking affects that kind of stuff. Sugary soda and aging is one thing, but marriage is another. I can't believe that soda speeds up aging. Science can literally do anything. It's a great article, really, because it shows that sodas aren't good for you. Water is though!
I cannot believe that. It is a scientific fact that 1 in 5 Americans will be obese, if there are approximately 317 people living in America as of 2014, one fifth of those people will be obese. You do the math. In my opinion (and this is not meant to be a joke) there are enough overweight people in today's society. Another fact, the average life for an American 78.74 years, and in California the average lifespan is 79.51 years. While this is a long life, it could definitely be longer compared to the average lifespan of a Japanese person which is 84.6 years as of 2012. Here are a few links to some of the sources I used:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-white and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
In fact, the sixth biggest cause of death in the United States is diabetes, there are about 100,000 deaths caused by diabetes IN A YEAR! In Los Angeles, 25.1 out of the 100,000 people had died of diabetes in Los Angeles. This doesn't mean that 25,000 people died of diabetes in LA, it means that in comparison to other states. The death rate for diabetes is higher than Alzheimer's disease, Influenza, and Blood Poisoning. We definitely need to cut back on the soft drinks. Luckily, the authorities have been catching on, and you can sometimes spot commercials for the organization Mixify®. Mixify was started by the companies who created Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Doctor Pepper to inform young children to moderate what they eat and drink while staying active. The death toll in the United States would go down by at least 100,000 people, and, I wouldn't mind having five more precious years of my life because I made the smart choice to moderate myself when I was young. Really good article, I will definitely look into this subject more.
This is an article that I don't like but also like at the same time. I usually drink about 1 soda every 2 weeks, but that is in a normal school week. During breaks I usually drink a bit more, maybe on every other day. The only thing I dont have is how long it takes over time. That is the only thing I dont like about this article, so now I am going to make myself a nice healthy glass of water.
This is a very interesting article. If you think about it, it is kind of like time travel. If you drink a soft drink daily, you look 1.9 years older. This proves that soda is very unhealthy for you. This also proves that there can be many chemicals in soda that can cause chemicals such as Chronic disease as well as many other terrible diseases. One of the craziest things about this article. It has no cure... Maybe they could stop putting chemicals in soda to make it taste good. I really liked the analogy that they made about the telomere shrinking. Each time that the telomere shrinks, you gain age. If the telomere gets too short, your cells stop dividing and well... die. The older your cells are, you can increase the probability of getting sick. I also cannot believe that this research has been started in the 60s!
Wow! Like Julianna said. I never knew that you can look older by drinking soda! That is so cool that it could do that and that 1.9 extra year are added to your look if you drink 8 ounces of sweetened soda every day! I don't think I am going to have a lot of soda anymore. People have got to find a cure for this. Grace said that "marriage and smoking affects that kind of stuff", that is so cool that it could do that. I really like this article
Mainly all of these soda effects just give very small or minor results not large enough to really change anything. I would keep drinking soda as much as I do still (I don't drink that much soda). because they note these are almost so minor you can't even notice the different changes because these changes are inside your body and not on the outside
I find that most of these studies can be somewhat flawed. How, if this development of these soft drinks is so terrible, can the average life expectancy be ever increasing? In addition, drinking soda may not just increase the risk of chronic diseases. Maybe it is the people who drink it. Perhaps, the people who are drinking the soda are also the ones with the unhealthy diet. It may not just be the soda. Besides these points, I find this somewhat interesting
I agree with Richie in the fact that there are already enough obese people in this society but I don't see how the death toll would go down by 100,000 people. I think that it is impossible to properly educate people on this matter because once you have a couple bottles of Coke, and you enjoy them it is extremely hard to stop. This article also mentions how the average american consumes about 82 grams of sugar a day. I think that if this statistic went down by about 10 grams, that would lead to longer lives and a more healthy, happy lifestyle. This would also fix the obesity problem that America has. If people ate 10 grams less of sugar a day, I believe everyone would come out happy, and even as importantly healthy. Overall, this article was very interesting and I will continue to look into this matter.
COOL!!!!!!! I had no idea that some soft drinks could cause such terrible diseases. It is incredible how 1.9 extra years are added on to your age if you drink around 8 ounces of sweetened soft drink a day. I am not allowed to have much soda, but people in my family LOVE soda. I am going to show this article with them when I see them again. Life is great and I would not like to ruin it with soda. I am ready to learn more about this topic.
COOL!!!!!!! I had no idea that some soft drinks could cause such terrible diseases. It is incredible how 1.9 extra years are added on to your age if you drink around 8 ounces of sweetened soft drink a day. I am not allowed to have much soda, but people in my family LOVE soda. I am going to show this article with them when I see them again. Life is great and I would not like to ruin it with soda. I am ready to learn more about this topic.
I can't believe this. I knew soda was bad for you, but not this bad! It is crazy how you age 1.9 years just by drinking 8 ounces of soda. Some people do that daily! I can just imagine how many years they age each year, on top of gaining weight from it. They suffer so much. I found it very interesting that the telomere can get so short it just stops. I also found it interesting that it can grow too, so if you have on bottle of soda, and then do something healthy afterward it could be ok. I think it would still be shorter, but not as short as it could be. I agree with Richie, there are enough obese people in this world and soft drinks are only producing more. It could also cause diabetes. A lot of deaths occur from this and there could be more from the soft drinks. I also agree with Justin. We need to educate people in this. This article is a great start, just look at us. Now that we know about it, we can tell other people and they can tell their friends. If enough people find out about this, we can stop the aging. I thought that this was a really good article.
This article is very so interesting! I did not know that soft drinks could speed aging, but drinking 8 ounces of sweetened soda daily makes 1.9 extra years of aging on your cells is just a really interesting yet horrible fact! I think that this article is also very important for America to know about because many Americans are obese and drink soda all the time. I also think that people will appreciate not drinking so much soda all the time not only because it will make them less obese but because if they get diabetes they will never be able to drink soda again except on some rare occasions unless they want to die. Also, I don't understand how researchers still haven't figured out how drinking these drinks can lead to these horrible diseases. Diabetes is a disease that means you can't have a lot of sugar or you will get ill. Diabetes is also caused a lot of the time by being a sugar addict and loving sugar and eating it too much. Soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. So haven't they figured this out yet?! Soft drinks can lead to diabetes because it contains a ton of sugar! One thing that I found new to learn was what telomeres can do. They are sequences of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes. But telomeres shorten every time a cell divides. If the telomere get too short though, the cell can die from not being able to divide. I found really interesting that this can determine the biological age of a cell. So when the telomeres become very short, you can have risk for these horrible diseases.
I also disagree with Justin G. You can get addicted to for example Coke, but you can get out of addictions. Also, if that's not possible, we could still educate America to not drink so much and lessen their sugar thirsty-ness. All we have tried is trying to get rid of all this sugar. Why couldn't we try to lessen this? If that is possible, then maybe in more future years we can fully get rid of sugary drinks. But I think that we have to take small steps in order to do this because America has been this way for so long.
I don't see how this study differentiates from or is new to what we already know. The chronic diseases that they mentioned that were caused by these drinks were type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and liver disease. These are not new diseases. Type 2 diabetes is cause by overconsumption of sugar, exactly what has always been in these drinks. Also, sugar causes more fat in the body. This fat will make your blood pressure go up because the fat will clog your blood stream and increase the resistance, therefore increasing your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is high, heart disease can be a very likely outcome. Also, i don't know much about liver disease, but I do know that the liver filters all the unused waste in your body, and an over consumption of sugar is one of them. This will cause your liver to overwork, and the outcome can be liver disease. This article was very interesting to me because I learned how these drinks can actually add to your aging.
This study is an amazing find. With people drinking less and less sodas, the life expectancy may go up by a few years. I knew that soda has high sugary damage and I have heard that it stunts your growth a bit, but I never thought that there would be a difference in age through cells, and I never thought it would be so drastic! I hope that Leung's team will be able to share this with the world, so it then becomes a much more healthy place to live, with a safer chance to living over 80.
I think that this article is amazing! I 100% completely agree with Julianna, Grace and practically everyone else who commented on this article. I wasn't really sure what "Telomeres" were so I looked them up to learn more about them.http://www.tasciences.com/what-is-a-telomere/. Turns out, telomeres are like little bottle caps that top off our DNA and and "protect your chromosomes". After I read that in the link above, I wondered how they got shorter. I decided not to answer that question because I was getting a little off topic. I usually never drink soft drinks (I've never had a coke, or pepsi, or most other soft drinks). But if this is what happens to you after just drinking a soda, what happens when you have a piece of candy, or ice-cream or other sugary foods! Ugh, I feel myself getting older by the second!
First of all, let me make a claim that my cause an outcry of disbelief in this blog: I think that this article has barely any scientific evidence to support and solidify it's claim. I will start off with a subtle, seemingly unimportant fact, which actually carries the magnitude to upturn this entire theory. They did not give a legitimate reason why they directly associated sugar consumption with shorter telomeres. In the final paragraph of the main "reasoning", without anything to give force behind their point, they attempt to connect aging with excessive sugar levels. I have a theory about what they did with this writing, and why everybody else in this line of comments has failed to realize it. My theory is connected to a single, very important fact, it being that they are trying to provoke human fear instinct. This may be a term familiar to most of you, and for those who are unawares of it's usage, it is the human reaction to something that frightens them, or stimulates their amygdala. When humans react to something that scares them, the first response is for the brain to become filled with that thought. A very useful survival mechanism, this immediate fear will be everlastingly important throughout all periods of human development. This makes us overlook that there are no irrefutable facts in this statement. Now, I understand that this may sound very conspiratorial, but the facts just don't add up. They do not have solid evidence, and that is final. I look forward to any rebuttals objecting to the points I made, or maybe pointing out anything I missed. Thank you for listening!
I knew that sodas were bad, but I never knew they were this bad. I cannot believe that if I drink 12 ounces of soda it causes 1.9 years of aging. Also, people who drink a 20-ounce bottle of a soft drink daily are aging 4.6 years. I love the science behind this story... I really love the part about Telemeres. Telemeres are good things that we need to keep in our bodies. They are a part of our bodies that protect our DNA from damage. When soda gets into your system, it weakens the Telemerers and eventually, they die. If only people knew about how soda could damage your life. This a really cool article, and it shows that science lives with us everywhere!
I think this article is VERY helpful and I am so glad I read it. I have read all of the research that people have done and I am now officially scared of soda. I can't believe that it is so good but at the same time so bad. I think that it's crazy how many websites have so much information on them and that the website should have put on some extra links to look at. I think it is kind of sad how many obese people there are and why nobody has really tried to stop it. I agree with everything Sarina said. It is good that this site is educating people but only some people. I think that more people should read this article and have social awareness about the bad thing in the world. I kind of agree with Conor that there wasn't much scientific evidence proving the facts and that would have been helpful, but I am sure that if you research you will find some websites with plenty of scientific information. I was kind of confused with the aging thing. Do you get older faster, die faster, or get more wrinkles?
The reason all of the soda companies put chemicals in is so that the drink tastes good. The companies don't care about your health or about how you can age 1.9 years by drinking their product daily, they care about money. You make your cells weaker by drinking soda, but I wonder how long they can be weak before dying. I am going to do some research on that.
20 comments:
WOW! I had no idea that soft drinks speed up aging! It is amazing how 1.9 extra years are added to your age, if you drink 8 ounces of sweetened soda daily! It took a lot of work to figure that fact out, and I am impressed. Leung's team must have worked 24/7 to figure out what they wanted to figure out. But I still can not believe soda speeds up aging! Science is very cool! LIFE IS COOL! I can't wait to learn more!
This is one of the hard-commitment things. I am going to tell my mom to stop drinking two cans of Coke every day. Seriously. I am going to throw away my soda. One second...
OK I am back. A regular coke is 12 oz. Approx, that is 2 years of aging. My cells would be twelve! And if I drank two cans, my cells would be weaker and older. That is just amazing. Also, it's cool that marriage and smoking affects that kind of stuff. Sugary soda and aging is one thing, but marriage is another. I can't believe that soda speeds up aging. Science can literally do anything. It's a great article, really, because it shows that sodas aren't good for you. Water is though!
I cannot believe that. It is a scientific fact that 1 in 5 Americans will be obese, if there are approximately 317 people living in America as of 2014, one fifth of those people will be obese. You do the math. In my opinion (and this is not meant to be a joke) there are enough overweight people in today's society. Another fact, the average life for an American 78.74 years, and in California the average lifespan is 79.51 years. While this is a long life, it could definitely be longer compared to the average lifespan of a Japanese person which is 84.6 years as of 2012. Here are a few links to some of the sources I used:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-white and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
In fact, the sixth biggest cause of death in the United States is diabetes, there are about 100,000 deaths caused by diabetes IN A YEAR! In Los Angeles, 25.1 out of the 100,000 people had died of diabetes in Los Angeles. This doesn't mean that 25,000 people died of diabetes in LA, it means that in comparison to other states. The death rate for diabetes is higher than Alzheimer's disease, Influenza, and Blood Poisoning. We definitely need to cut back on the soft drinks. Luckily, the authorities have been catching on, and you can sometimes spot commercials for the organization Mixify®. Mixify was started by the companies who created Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Doctor Pepper to inform young children to moderate what they eat and drink while staying active. The death toll in the United States would go down by at least 100,000 people, and, I wouldn't mind having five more precious years of my life because I made the smart choice to moderate myself when I was young. Really good article, I will definitely look into this subject more.
This is an article that I don't like but also like at the same time. I usually drink about 1 soda every 2 weeks, but that is in a normal school week. During breaks I usually drink a bit more, maybe on every other day. The only thing I dont have is how long it takes over time. That is the only thing I dont like about this article, so now I am going to make myself a nice healthy glass of water.
This is a very interesting article. If you think about it, it is kind of like time travel. If you drink a soft drink daily, you look 1.9 years older. This proves that soda is very unhealthy for you. This also proves that there can be many chemicals in soda that can cause chemicals such as Chronic disease as well as many other terrible diseases. One of the craziest things about this article. It has no cure... Maybe they could stop putting chemicals in soda to make it taste good. I really liked the analogy that they made about the telomere shrinking. Each time that the telomere shrinks, you gain age. If the telomere gets too short, your cells stop dividing and well... die. The older your cells are, you can increase the probability of getting sick. I also cannot believe that this research has been started in the 60s!
Wow! Like Julianna said. I never knew that you can look older by drinking soda! That is so cool that it could do that and that 1.9 extra year are added to your look if you drink 8 ounces of sweetened soda every day! I don't think I am going to have a lot of soda anymore. People have got to find a cure for this. Grace said that "marriage and smoking affects that kind of stuff", that is so cool that it could do that. I really like this article
Mainly all of these soda effects just give very small or minor results not large enough to really change anything. I would keep drinking soda as much as I do still (I don't drink that much soda). because they note these are almost so minor you can't even notice the different changes because these changes are inside your body and not on the outside
I find that most of these studies can be somewhat flawed. How, if this development of these soft drinks is so terrible, can the average life expectancy be ever increasing? In addition, drinking soda may not just increase the risk of chronic diseases. Maybe it is the people who drink it. Perhaps, the people who are drinking the soda are also the ones with the unhealthy diet. It may not just be the soda. Besides these points, I find this somewhat interesting
I agree with Richie in the fact that there are already enough obese people in this society but I don't see how the death toll would go down by 100,000 people. I think that it is impossible to properly educate people on this matter because once you have a couple bottles of Coke, and you enjoy them it is extremely hard to stop. This article also mentions how the average american consumes about 82 grams of sugar a day. I think that if this statistic went down by about 10 grams, that would lead to longer lives and a more healthy, happy lifestyle. This would also fix the obesity problem that America has. If people ate 10 grams less of sugar a day, I believe everyone would come out happy, and even as importantly healthy. Overall, this article was very interesting and I will continue to look into this matter.
COOL!!!!!!! I had no idea that some soft drinks could cause such terrible diseases. It is incredible how 1.9 extra years are added on to your age if you drink around 8 ounces of sweetened soft drink a day. I am not allowed to have much soda, but people in my family LOVE soda. I am going to show this article with them when I see them again. Life is great and I would not like to ruin it with soda. I am ready to learn more about this topic.
COOL!!!!!!! I had no idea that some soft drinks could cause such terrible diseases. It is incredible how 1.9 extra years are added on to your age if you drink around 8 ounces of sweetened soft drink a day. I am not allowed to have much soda, but people in my family LOVE soda. I am going to show this article with them when I see them again. Life is great and I would not like to ruin it with soda. I am ready to learn more about this topic.
I can't believe this. I knew soda was bad for you, but not this bad! It is crazy how you age 1.9 years just by drinking 8 ounces of soda. Some people do that daily! I can just imagine how many years they age each year, on top of gaining weight from it. They suffer so much. I found it very interesting that the telomere can get so short it just stops. I also found it interesting that it can grow too, so if you have on bottle of soda, and then do something healthy afterward it could be ok. I think it would still be shorter, but not as short as it could be. I agree with Richie, there are enough obese people in this world and soft drinks are only producing more. It could also cause diabetes. A lot of deaths occur from this and there could be more from the soft drinks. I also agree with Justin. We need to educate people in this. This article is a great start, just look at us. Now that we know about it, we can tell other people and they can tell their friends. If enough people find out about this, we can stop the aging. I thought that this was a really good article.
This article is very so interesting! I did not know that soft drinks could speed aging, but drinking 8 ounces of sweetened soda daily makes 1.9 extra years of aging on your cells is just a really interesting yet horrible fact! I think that this article is also very important for America to know about because many Americans are obese and drink soda all the time. I also think that people will appreciate not drinking so much soda all the time not only because it will make them less obese but because if they get diabetes they will never be able to drink soda again except on some rare occasions unless they want to die. Also, I don't understand how researchers still haven't figured out how drinking these drinks can lead to these horrible diseases. Diabetes is a disease that means you can't have a lot of sugar or you will get ill. Diabetes is also caused a lot of the time by being a sugar addict and loving sugar and eating it too much. Soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. So haven't they figured this out yet?! Soft drinks can lead to diabetes because it contains a ton of sugar! One thing that I found new to learn was what telomeres can do. They are sequences of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes. But telomeres shorten every time a cell divides. If the telomere get too short though, the cell can die from not being able to divide. I found really interesting that this can determine the biological age of a cell. So when the telomeres become very short, you can have risk for these horrible diseases.
I also disagree with Justin G. You can get addicted to for example Coke, but you can get out of addictions. Also, if that's not possible, we could still educate America to not drink so much and lessen their sugar thirsty-ness. All we have tried is trying to get rid of all this sugar. Why couldn't we try to lessen this? If that is possible, then maybe in more future years we can fully get rid of sugary drinks. But I think that we have to take small steps in order to do this because America has been this way for so long.
I don't see how this study differentiates from or is new to what we already know. The chronic diseases that they mentioned that were caused by these drinks were type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and liver disease. These are not new diseases. Type 2 diabetes is cause by overconsumption of sugar, exactly what has always been in these drinks. Also, sugar causes more fat in the body. This fat will make your blood pressure go up because the fat will clog your blood stream and increase the resistance, therefore increasing your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is high, heart disease can be a very likely outcome. Also, i don't know much about liver disease, but I do know that the liver filters all the unused waste in your body, and an over consumption of sugar is one of them. This will cause your liver to overwork, and the outcome can be liver disease. This article was very interesting to me because I learned how these drinks can actually add to your aging.
This study is an amazing find. With people drinking less and less sodas, the life expectancy may go up by a few years. I knew that soda has high sugary damage and I have heard that it stunts your growth a bit, but I never thought that there would be a difference in age through cells, and I never thought it would be so drastic! I hope that Leung's team will be able to share this with the world, so it then becomes a much more healthy place to live, with a safer chance to living over 80.
I think that this article is amazing! I 100% completely agree with Julianna, Grace and practically everyone else who commented on this article. I wasn't really sure what "Telomeres" were so I looked them up to learn more about them.http://www.tasciences.com/what-is-a-telomere/. Turns out, telomeres are like little bottle caps that top off our DNA and and "protect your chromosomes". After I read that in the link above, I wondered how they got shorter. I decided not to answer that question because I was getting a little off topic. I usually never drink soft drinks (I've never had a coke, or pepsi, or most other soft drinks). But if this is what happens to you after just drinking a soda, what happens when you have a piece of candy, or ice-cream or other sugary foods! Ugh, I feel myself getting older by the second!
First of all, let me make a claim that my cause an outcry of disbelief in this blog: I think that this article has barely any scientific evidence to support and solidify it's claim. I will start off with a subtle, seemingly unimportant fact, which actually carries the magnitude to upturn this entire theory. They did not give a legitimate reason why they directly associated sugar consumption with shorter telomeres. In the final paragraph of the main "reasoning", without anything to give force behind their point, they attempt to connect aging with excessive sugar levels. I have a theory about what they did with this writing, and why everybody else in this line of comments has failed to realize it. My theory is connected to a single, very important fact, it being that they are trying to provoke human fear instinct. This may be a term familiar to most of you, and for those who are unawares of it's usage, it is the human reaction to something that frightens them, or stimulates their amygdala. When humans react to something that scares them, the first response is for the brain to become filled with that thought. A very useful survival mechanism, this immediate fear will be everlastingly important throughout all periods of human development. This makes us overlook that there are no irrefutable facts in this statement. Now, I understand that this may sound very conspiratorial, but the facts just don't add up. They do not have solid evidence, and that is final. I look forward to any rebuttals objecting to the points I made, or maybe pointing out anything I missed. Thank you for listening!
I knew that sodas were bad, but I never knew they were this bad. I cannot believe that if I drink 12 ounces of soda it causes 1.9 years of aging. Also, people who drink a 20-ounce bottle of a soft drink daily are aging 4.6 years. I love the science behind this story...
I really love the part about Telemeres. Telemeres are good things that we need to keep in our bodies. They are a part of our bodies that protect our DNA from damage. When soda gets into your system, it weakens the Telemerers and eventually, they die. If only people knew about how soda could damage your life. This a really cool article, and it shows that science lives with us everywhere!
I think this article is VERY helpful and I am so glad I read it. I have read all of the research that people have done and I am now officially scared of soda. I can't believe that it is so good but at the same time so bad. I think that it's crazy how many websites have so much information on them and that the website should have put on some extra links to look at. I think it is kind of sad how many obese people there are and why nobody has really tried to stop it. I agree with everything Sarina said. It is good that this site is educating people but only some people. I think that more people should read this article and have social awareness about the bad thing in the world. I kind of agree with Conor that there wasn't much scientific evidence proving the facts and that would have been helpful, but I am sure that if you research you will find some websites with plenty of scientific information. I was kind of confused with the aging thing. Do you get older faster, die faster, or get more wrinkles?
The reason all of the soda companies put chemicals in is so that the drink tastes good. The companies don't care about your health or about how you can age 1.9 years by drinking their product daily, they care about money. You make your cells weaker by drinking soda, but I wonder how long they can be weak before dying. I am going to do some research on that.
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