Diet colas not good for heart

Diet soda (sugar-free soft drinks) may benefit the waistline, but people who drink it everyday may have a heightened risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a new US study.

A shopper walks past Coca-Cola Co.’s Diet Coke displayed on shelf in Atlanta. Bloomberg 

 

Although the researchers, whose work appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that older adults who drank diet soda everyday were 44% more likely to suffer a heart attack compared with 22% for people who rarely or never drank diet soda but had a heart attack or stroke. Their research, however, did not prove that the sugar-free drinks alone were to blame.

Lead researcher Hannah Gardener, of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and her team studied 2,564 New York City adults who were 69 years or older at the study’s start. Over the next decade, 591 men and women had a heart attack, stroke or died of cardiovascular causes —including 31% of the 163 people who drank a diet soda daily at the start of the study.

There may be other things about diet-soda lovers that explain the connection, says Gardener. “What we saw was an association. These people may tend to have more unhealthy habits,” she says. The study noted that daily diet-soda drinkers tend to be heavier and more often have heart risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and unhealthy cholesterol levels.