SOMERVILLE, Mass., Aug. 20 (Nationwide Times) — For people who drink soda or another sugar-sweetened beverage every day, a new U.S. study offers a reason to reconsider that routine — without showing that an individual daily drink will cause cancer.
Researchers at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute found that adults who consumed at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day had 2.45 times the risk of gastric cancer, also called stomach cancer, compared with people who drank fewer than one serving a month.
The study was observational. That means it identified a relationship between beverage intake and cancer rates, but it could not prove that sugary drinks or fructose caused the cancer. Senior author Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, said the study “is unable to really prove cause and effect.”
What the study found
The analysis included 112,284 participants from two long-running U.S. studies: the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Researchers examined information collected from 1986 through 2022. During that period, 278 participants had documented cases of gastric cancer.
Those 278 cases represented about 0.25% of the full study group over the entire period. But the researchers did not provide the absolute cancer risk for each beverage-consumption group in the information released about the study. As a result, the 2.45 figure describes a relative difference between groups, not an individual person’s chance of developing stomach cancer.
The researchers also found that higher total fructose intake was associated with a higher incidence of gastric cancer. The study included sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages, punch, lemonade and sports drinks. Other descriptions of the study included regular soda, energy drinks and juice with added sugar.
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 analysis found no association between higher consumption of artificially sweetened beverages and increased gastric-cancer incidence after adjustments for other factors. The study defined those beverages as low-calorie carbonated drinks. The finding does not show that artificially sweetened drinks reduce cancer risk.
What “higher risk” means here
Relative risk compares the likelihood of an outcome between groups. A 2.45-times higher relative risk can sound dramatic, but it does not reveal the starting risk. If the underlying risk is small, the increase in a person’s absolute risk may also be small.
The study’s total case count cannot be used to calculate the risk for daily drinkers or rare consumers because the released information does not show how many participants were in each intake group, how long each person was followed or how the cases were distributed among those groups.
The results therefore do not mean that most people who drink a sugary beverage each day will develop stomach cancer. They show that, in this group of U.S. participants, daily consumption was statistically associated with more cases than very infrequent consumption.
Why the findings are not final proof
Because the participants were not randomly assigned to drink or avoid sugary beverages, other differences between the groups could have influenced the result. The researchers adjusted for other potential risk factors, but the released study summaries do not list every factor included in the statistical analysis.
The findings also do not establish whether the association was caused specifically by sugary drinks, fructose, another ingredient or broader dietary and lifestyle patterns linked with beverage choices.
Chan said more research is needed to determine whether the relationship is causal. The study, by Gweon TG and colleagues, was published in Gastro Hep Advances.
For everyday decisions, the research supports treating daily sugary drinks as a potentially unfavorable habit rather than as proof of imminent danger. It does not establish a cancer-prevention benefit from replacing them with artificially sweetened beverages, and it does not supply a personal risk estimate for any one person.
