Forget botox injections or a Renee Zellweger face lift, the secret to staying younger could be avoiding the soft drink aisle.
Your favourite can of fizz could be making you years older, new research has found.
The study published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at what effect sugary soft drinks have on the body’s natural ageing process.
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As you get older, your ‘telomeres’, which protect your DNA from damage when your cells replenish themselves, naturally get shorter and less effective over time.
What the US researchers wanted to know was whether guzzling full-sugar carbonated drinks speeds up the shrinkage. And yes, it looks like it does.
Of the 5000 Americans aged 20 to 65 they tested, those who said they drank 350ml of soft drink per day had cell damage similar to those 4.6 years older. Those who drank 237ml a day were 1.9 years older, based on the damage to their cells.
To put this in context, a regular soft drinker could be damaging their cells at the same rate as a regular smoker, the study found.
ABS data shows that 29 per cent of Australians consume soft drinks, although one-third of these cool drinks are artificially sweetened, which were not tested by the study.
Those who do drink cans and bottles of fizz gulp an average of 375ml a day, which means their bodies could be almost five years older as a result, if the findings are correct.
Shorter telomeres are linked to higher risk for heart disease and some cancers, which is why the study concluded that regular consumption of sugar-sweetened sodas “might influence metabolic disease development through accelerated cell aging”.
