Drinking sugary beverages every day may double the risk of developing stomach cancer, according to a new study, while drinks with artificial sweeteners did not show the same risk.
While earlier studies have connected sugar-sweetened drinks to higher rates of colorectal, breast, and liver cancers, there has been little evidence until now about their link to stomach cancer.
Researchers found that people who drank at least one sugary beverage a day faced twice the risk of stomach cancer compared to those who had less than one serving a month.
“This is the first study to demonstrate an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and gastric cancer in a US population,” Andrew Chan, author of the study published in the journal Gastro Hep Advances, said.
“Gastric cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, but we’ve known very little about how diet might contribute to this cancer.”
The study followed 112,000 people over several decades, and 278 of them developed stomach cancer. The increased risk was seen in both men and women.
Most of the sugary drinks in the study were sweetened with fructose, which was linked to a higher rate of stomach cancer among participants.
Among women, those who drank more than one sugar-sweetened beverage a day, such as punch, lemonade, or sports drinks, had nearly three times the risk of stomach cancer compared to women who rarely drank them.
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By contrast, people who drank more artificially sweetened or low-calorie carbonated drinks did not have a higher risk of stomach cancer.
Previous research indicates that infection with Helicobacter pylori raises the risk of gastric cancer. In the most recent study, H. pylori status was evaluated in a subset of 940 participants, revealing no association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and H. pylori infection.
Researchers noted that the study was observational, meaning it cannot prove that sugary drinks directly cause stomach cancer.
The study also had limited data on participants’ H. pylori infection status and family history of stomach cancer.
