Sugary drinks found linked to stomach cancer for first time

People who drink sugary beverages daily are at a higher risk of developing stomach cancer, a new study warns while hinting that artificial sweeteners can lower the danger.

Previous research has widely linked sugar-sweetened beverages with an increased risk of colorectal, breast, and liver cancers, but evidence on gastric cancer has been limited.

The new study found that people who consumed at least one serving of a sugar-sweetened beverage a day carried twice the risk of gastric cancer compared with those who consumed less than a serving per month.

“This is the first study to demonstrate an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and gastric cancer in a US population,” Andrew Chan, author of the study published in the journal Gastro Hep Advances, said.

“Gastric cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, but we’ve known very little about how diet might contribute to this cancer.”

The study assessed the health and lifestyle data from 112,000 people spanning several decades and found that 278 of them developed gastric cancer. The link was observed in both women and men.

Fructose was the main sweetener in the drinks consumed by the participants, which was found to be associated with greater gastric cancer incidence.

In women, daily consumption of more than one sugar-sweetened beverage – punch, lemonade, sports drinks – was associated with an almost three-fold higher risk of gastric cancer, compared to those who did so rarely.

In comparison, the study found that higher consumption of artificially sweetened and low-calorie carbonated beverages wasn’t associated with a higher incidence of gastric cancer.

Previous research has shown that infection by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori increases the risk of gastric cancer. The latest study assessed the H pylori status in a subset of 940 participants, and found that there was no association between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and infection by this bacterium.

Citing the main limitation of the study, researchers said the findings were observational and didn’t establish a causal link.

There was also limited information from participants on their H pylori status and family history of gastric cancer.

The study participants were predominantly white, constraining the ability of researchers to examine differences across racial and ethnic groups.

However, since the analysed data included lifestyle information gathered over many years, researchers said they could control for many potential risk factors for gastric cancer. They called for further studies to confirm the findings and investigate why sugar-sweetened beverages increased the danger of gastric cancer.