SOMERVILLE, Mass., Aug. 20 (Nationwide Times) — A U.S. study found that people who reported drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day had 2.45 times the risk of developing stomach cancer compared with people who drank fewer than one serving a month.
The finding may matter for everyday choices involving regular soda, sweetened juice drinks, lemonade, punch, sports drinks and similar beverages. But the study does not show that sugary drinks cause stomach cancer, and it does not provide the absolute risk for an individual who drinks them daily.
The research was conducted by investigators at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute and published in Gastro Hep Advances. It analyzed dietary and health data from 112,284 participants in the U.S. Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The records covered 1986 through 2022 and included 278 documented cases of gastric cancer, also called stomach cancer.
What does “2.45 times the risk” mean?
The 2.45 figure is a relative comparison between two groups: people reporting at least one sugar-sweetened beverage per day and those reporting fewer than one serving per month.
It does not mean that 2.45 out of every 10 daily consumers developed cancer. The study recorded 278 cases among the entire cohort over the study period — about 0.25% of all participants — but the researchers’ reported results do not provide the separate absolute risk for each beverage-consumption group.
That distinction is important because a large relative difference can correspond to a smaller difference in actual cases when the disease is uncommon. The study was not designed to predict an individual person’s chance of developing stomach cancer.
What did the researchers measure?
The researchers examined intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and total fructose, a type of sugar. The beverage category included carbonated drinks, punch, lemonade and sports drinks; other summaries of the study also refer to regular soda and drinks containing added sugar.
Higher total fructose intake was associated with a higher incidence of stomach cancer. However, the study materials do not establish whether the association was caused specifically by fructose, by sugary beverages, by a broader dietary pattern or by another factor related to those exposures.
Among women in the Nurses’ Health Study, consuming more than one sugar-sweetened beverage per day was associated with a 3.04-fold higher risk compared with very rare consumption. The researchers reported an association in both women and men.
The study also found no increased stomach-cancer incidence associated with higher consumption of artificially sweetened beverages after adjustment for other factors. In the analysis, those drinks were defined as low-calorie carbonated beverages. The result does not show that artificially sweetened beverages reduce cancer risk.
Why can’t the study prove cause and effect?
The research was observational. That means investigators compared information recorded in long-running health studies rather than assigning participants to drink particular beverages.
Andrew T. Chan, the study’s senior author and a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Mass General Brigham and Massachusetts General Hospital, said the study could identify an association but could not prove cause and effect. The researchers adjusted for other potential risk factors, but the available study summary does not list every factor in the statistical analysis or provide the study’s confidence intervals and other detailed measures of uncertainty.
People who consume sugary drinks may differ from people who rarely consume them in other ways that affect health. The study therefore adds to research about diet and stomach cancer but does not establish that changing one beverage habit would prevent a particular cancer.
For a normal daily decision, the clearest conclusion supported by the research is limited: frequent sugar-sweetened beverage consumption was linked with a higher rate of stomach cancer in these U.S. cohorts. The result is a reason for further research, not evidence that every daily consumer faces a high or immediate risk.
