July 16, 2015

Sweetened carbonated beverages, known as soft drinks or sodas, have been studied for the possibility that they can raise the risk of pancreatic cancer.

A study from the University of Minnesota looked at the data for 60,000 Chinese men and women who were followed for 14 years and found that drinking two or more soft drinks a week was associated with near-doubling of the incidence of pancreatic cancer compared with people who never had soft drinks. The consumption of soft drinks coincided with a number of other unhealthy lifestyle characteristics, making it somewhat difficult to separate smoking, caloric intake, body weight, and type 2 diabetes from soft drink consumption.

A previous study from the University of California at San Francisco published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control  found that consumption of low-calorie soft drinks increased the risk of pancreatic cancer among men.

A laboratory study done at the European Foundation for Oncology and Environmental Sciences in Italy found that rats fed daily the sugar-containing soft drink Coca-Cola were more likely to develop benign and malignant pancreatic tumors. The European research, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, cautioned that “On the basis of the results of this study, excessive consumption of regular soft-drinks should be generally discouraged, in particular for children and adolescents.” (Belpoggi et. al)