Sugary sodas can lead to shorter telomeres, which isn't a good thing. (AFP/Getty Images)
Sodas have lots of sugar and lots of calories. Yeah yeah yeah, so what else is new?
Well, funny you should ask. Not “funny” as in ha-ha, but “funny” as in…you gotta be kidding me.
This report comes via the Washington Post, which in turn saw it in the American Journal of Public Health. But enough giving credit where it’s due. The important news is this: More soda = shorter telomeres = shortened life span.
All of which means nothing if we don’t know what a telomere is. So here goes: A telomere “is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromatid, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusing with neighboring chromosomes.” That’s what Wikipedia says.
In layman (and Leslie) terms, a telomere is this: A cap at the ends of our chromosomes. As we age, telomeres get shorter. The shorter they get, the tougher it is for a cell to regenerate. Thus, aging occurs.
Which brings us back to the role sugary sodas plays in this. For the study, scientists at several universities studied 5,309 U.S. adults who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2002. Participants, who ranged in age from 20 to 65 and had no history of diabetes or heart disease, were not tracked; they were measured at only one point in time. Using stored DNA, researchers determined that more soda made for shorter telomeres.
Senior author and University of California San Francisco psychiatry professor Elissa Epel said this to CBS San Francisco: “We think we can get away with drinking lots of soda as long as we are not gaining weight, but this suggests that there is an invisible pathway that leads to accelerated aging, regardless of weight.”
Specifically, a 20-ounce soda a day is linked to 4.6 years of — as The Post says — “additional aging.”
So what to do with this info? Drink water. Or perhaps don’t drink as many sodas. Or tell everyone who gives you a hard time about your soda habit that telomeres are going to shrink anyway. One of those aging things, ya know.
Still….if you could lessen your chances for developing more cavities and adding extra pounds AND perhaps slower-aging telomeres, wouldn’t giving up that daily fix be worth it?