HR leaders actively promoting healthy lifestyles among workers may have a new challenge to face – convincing employees to consider giving up their daily soft drinks. When compared to health risks such as smoking, a sedentary lifestyle or inability to manage stress effectively, simply drinking colas and similar popular drinks regularly could sound harmless. However, mounting evidence shows regular consumption of both the sugar containing and diet varieties of these drinks are linked to significant health problems, raising the possibility that employees should be educated about this connection and encouraged to break the daily soft drink habit.
For example, Harvard scientists published research in the journal Diabetes Care in 2010 involving over 300,000 participants that revealed drinking one to two sugar-containing soft drinks a day raised the risk of type 2 diabetes by 26%. They also found these drinks boosted the risk of obesity and metabolic syndrome, which, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), greatly increases the risk of coronary artery disease and stroke. Sweetened soft drinks, the research team concluded, ". . . should be limited to reduce the obesity-related risk of chronic metabolic diseases."
Another Harvard study, released in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, followed 74,749 women and almost 40,000 men for over two decades and reached a similar conclusion. After controlling for other major lifestyle and dietary risk factors as well pre-existing medical conditions, the scientists found once again that drinking sweetened soft drinks was significantly associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
Why Diet Soda is Also a Risk
The bad news about regular sodas may seem to indicate that simply switching to the low calorie or no calorie varieties would be good news for health as well as waistlines. Unfortunately, scientists have found that diet colas hold health risks, too.
- Surprisingly, multiple studies have found drinking diet sodas actually increases the risk of excess weight. For example, University of Texas Science Center research found an almost60% increase in the risk of obesityfor those consuming more than two servings of diet soda daily.
- Tufts University researchers reported that women who drank just three diet or full-sugar soft drinks a week hadsignificantly more bone lossat important sites in their hips than women who drank other beverages. The scientists think the possible cause could be phosphoric acid, known to contribute to calcium loss from bones, which is found in both types of drinks. Phosphoric acid also erodes tooth enamel, promoting tooth decay.
- A 2009 Nurses Health Study of 3,256 women uncovered a30% decrease in the kidney functionof participants who drank two or more servings of diet sodas each day.
Diet and Regular Sodas Linked to Depression
New research by NIH scientists suggests that drinking sodas, especially diet drinks, also increases the risk of depression in adults. NIH researcher Honglei Chen, MD, Ph.D., a member of the American Academy of Neurology, and his team studied 263,925 people between the ages of 50 and 71 for several years, documenting their consumption of a variety of drinks.
After about a decade, researchers asked the participants whether they had been diagnosed with depression since the year 2000. The results showed that those who consumed more than four cans or cups of soda each day were 30% more likely to develop depression than those who didn’t drink soda. The risk was even higher for those who drank diet rather than regular soda.
Coffee: A Healthier Choice?
While studying the soft drink link to health risks, another unexpected finding has emerged from several studies – coffee appears to have health benefits and could be a far better choice for employee snack rooms than a refrigerator stocked with colas. For example, the recent NIH study cited above found that drinking coffee was associated with a lower risk of depression. Harvard scientists have also found that coffee drinkers have a significantly lowered risk of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
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