Adults who consume at least two litres of sugar- or artificially sweetened beverages a week have a higher risk of atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heart rhythm, than those who drink less, research has claimed.
The study, published in a peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association, said drinking one litre or less of pure, unsweetened juice was associated with a lower risk of atrial fibrillation, or AFib.
However, the research, which was run in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, could not confirm whether the sweetened drinks caused AFib, yet the association remained after accounting for a person’s genetic susceptibility to the condition.
The study analysed data in the UK Biobank, which holds de-identified genetic and health information of around 500,000 individuals.
“Our study’s findings cannot definitively conclude that one beverage poses more health risk than another due to the complexity of our diets and because some people may drink more than one type of beverage,” lead study author Ningjian Wang, a researcher at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, said.
“However, based on these findings, we recommend that people reduce or even avoid artificially sweetened and sugar-sweetened beverages whenever possible. Do not take it for granted that drinking low-sugar and low-calorie artificially sweetened beverages is healthy, it may pose potential health risks.”
The researchers said they reviewed data from questionnaires and genetic data for more than 200,000 adults free of AFib at the time they enrolled in the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010. During the nearly ten years that followed, there were 9,362 cases of AFib among the study participants, the researchers said.
UK trade body The British Soft Drinks Association questioned the veracity of the data and the conclusions the researchers drew from the study.
“As the authors of this study themselves admit, this is observational research which, firstly, cannot prove cause, and which, secondly, involves data that could be subject to memory errors or bias from the participants,” BSDA director general Gavin Partington said.
“All soft drinks, whatever their ingredients, are safe to consume as part of a balanced diet, not least fruit juice, a 150ml portion of which counts as one of your five [portions of fruit or veg] a day. Just under 70% of soft drinks sold in the UK in 2022 were low- or no-sugar, according to figures from GlobalData, and this side of the market has grown in recent years.”
However, Huib van Bockel, the CEO of Tenzing, a UK-based supplier of “natural” energy drinks, said: “This latest research confirms what I’ve been following for years – that artificial sweeteners should never have been created as an alternative to sugar. In the same way people tend to think vaping is better than smoking the long-term effects are still unknown.”
