Whenever a health study comes along, it inevitably gets taken out of context. And so it is with a new report from Tufts University, claiming that sugar, specifically sugary drinks, kill 180,000 people a year. The headlines are undeniably eye-catching… but what’s really at work here?
So, wait, 180,000 people a year? Really?
Yeah, but that number needs some important context: 56 million people die across the globe annually, according to the World Health Organization. So, if you crunch the numbers, this isn’t even 1 percent of that total. That said, diabetes is one of the major four killers of human beings, so, yeah, that’s still an issue.
The headlines make it sound like sugary drinks will kill me immediately.
It makes for great clickbait, but the real issue here is the overall consumption of sugar; the data in the Tufts report lines up pretty well with the countries that eat the most sugar, period. That these countries also tend to produce a lot of sugar is no coincidence either.
More importantly, these deaths are A) preventable and B) indirect. Like any panicky health headline, it really comes back to making better choices for yourself.
So, basically what this Tufts report is really saying is, “Dial back on the sugar?”
Yup. The soda angle plays in the press, but the reality is, they set out to prove that drinking too much sugar is just as bad for you as eating too much of it. Which they did, despite the fact that nobody aside from PR flacks and lobbyists are arguing otherwise. The only people arguing that a little sugar in your coffee or the occasional soda will kill you are the kind of people who scream about Leg Day on Facebook. If you’re concerned about your health, just get a water or an unsweetened tea more often. That’s really what you should take away from this study.
(Via Washington Post and WHO)