Soda is just one of those things that science will keep finding worse and worse things out about until we finally stop drinking it.
Now, a study done on almost 800,000 patients has found that soda is associated with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
Of course, this isn’t the first study to find heart health risks with soda. There have also been studies that associate soda with stroke and other cardiovascular diseases.
“However,” says Professor Keijiro Saku, the lead investigator of the study, “Until now the association between drinking large amounts of carbonated beverages and fatal CVD, or out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) of cardiac origin, was unclear.”
The study focused on 785,591 OHCA cases where patients were revived. They focused on data from OCHA cases that originated from the heart, and those that didn’t, between 2005 and 2011.
They also pulled from data about people’s purchases, to see how many carbonated beverages, as well as other beverages like water, coffee, tea, and fruit juice, these people purchased in comparison to whether or not they experienced cardiac arrest.
They found that the association of carbonated beverages to cardiac arrest wasn’t strong enough to say that one definitely causes the other, but it was definitely strong enough that it’s safe to say that cutting soda out would be pretty beneficial. ##MN_RESP##
The other beverages didn’t have a significant risk increase at all.
The professor believes that the acid in carbonated beverages is probably what aggravates the heart. This is different from a lot of other studies, which claim that the sugar is a big factor in the soda’s unhealthiness. But the acidity of a soda can clearly do plenty of damage, too.
