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Brief Description:

Are you a middle-aged adult? Do you drink more than one soft-drink per day? It doesn't matter if it's diet or regular. According to a study by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, you may have a more than 40 percent greater rate of either having or developing metabolic syndrome-that's a cluster of conditions that increase the risk for heart disease.

Transcript:

AKINSO: Are you a middle-aged adult? Do you drink more than one soft-drink per day? It doesn't matter if it's diet or regular. According to a study by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, you may have a more than 40 percent greater rate of either having or developing metabolic syndrome — that's a cluster of conditions that increase the risk for heart disease. While the increased risk of metabolic syndrome associated with high-calorie, high-sugar regular soft drinks might be expected, the similar risk found among those drinking diet sodas may cause a few raised eyebrows, according to Dr. Caroline Fox, co-author of the study.

FOX: What's very intriguing about this study's finding is that it was both regular and diet soft drinks that were associated with metabolic syndrome. And what these results suggest is that soft drink consumption whether diet or regular maybe a marker for increased metabolic syndrome risk.

AKINSO: Dr. Fox said the findings point to the importance of long-term observational studies, which allow researchers to take a closer look at how aspects of diet are interrelated with health risks. The results are from the Framingham Heart Study's, "Soft Drink Consumption and Risk of Developing Cardio-Metabolic Risk Factors and the Metabolic Syndrome in Middle Aged Adults in the Community," which was published online in the Circulation in July. This is Wally Akinso at the National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland.