A large study published in 2019 in JAMA Internal Medicine showed an association between greater consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and artificially sweetened soft drinks and all-cause mortality. The study looked at data on more than 450,000 people from 10 countries in Europe and found that those who drank two or more sugary beverages or artificially sweetened beverages daily were more likely to die sooner of any cause compared to people who drank less than one of those drinks per month. Interestingly, the study linked artificially sweetened soft drinks to more deaths from circulatory diseases while sugar-sweetened beverages were associated with more deaths from digestive diseases.

You’ll gain more of the worst kind of belly fat.

Technically called visceral adipose tissue (VAT), or “the most dangerous belly fat in your body” this kind of deep abdominal fat surrounding your internal organs secretes chemicals that put you at risk for a host of metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. A study in the Journal of Nutrition that looked at the soda consumption habits of healthy individuals linked daily soda drinking to a 10% higher volume of VAT when compared to non-sugary beverage drinkers.

Memory Loss with orange soda.

If you want to improve your memory, drinking sugar-sweetened beverages isn’t the path to better brainpower.
Researchers analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, a large long-term study of the lifestyles of the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, and found an association between soda drinking and memory problems and an increased risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, as well as stroke.

If you’re wondering which types of soda are among the worst for your brain function, it’s those neon-colored sodas like orange Fanta (44 grams of sugar per can) and Mountain Dew (46 grams).

Soda may be linked to colon cancer.

Research published in the British medical journal Gut suggests that a high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages in adolescence and adulthood may increase the risk of early-onset colorectal cancer in women.
By analyzing the dietary and medical records of more than 95,000 women involved in the US Nurses’ Health II study over a 24-year period, the researchers found that women who drank more than a pint of sugary beverages a day were twice as likely over the course of the study to be diagnosed with bowel cancer than those who drank less than half a pint a week.

Colas may make your bones weak.

The type of soda you prefer may have an impact on a particularly important structural part of your body, namely your bones.

Using data from the Framingham Osteoporosis Study, researchers compared bone mineral density, a component of bone strength, at the hip and spine in 2,000 participants against dietary information from a food-frequency questionnaire. It turned out that consumption of cola (about four servings a week) was associated with significantly lower bone density in the hips in the women studied. (But the same result was not found in men.)

Sodas and sugar-sweetened beverages may harm your heart.

Dietitians and cardiologists have long advised against consuming lots of added sugars from all sorts of sources because of a potential increase in risk for heart disease. In 2020, an observational study in the Journal of the American Heart Association looked at medical and dietary data of nearly 6,000 people and found that when compared to people who drank no sugar-sweetened beverages, those who drank one serving or more per day of soda or other sugary beverages had significantly higher triglyceride (blood fat) levels and decreased high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL), the protective “good” cholesterol.

High triglycerides and low HDL indicate an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, suggesting that sugar-sweetened beveragesintake may be the mechanism that boosts your chances of developing heart trouble.