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The habit, common in the UK, has been linked to a sharply increased risk of gastric cancer
Researchers uncovered a striking link between daily consumption of sugary drinks and stomach cancer.
Their peer-reviewed findings, published by the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute in the journal Gastro Hep Advances, reveal that individuals who drank at least one sugar-sweetened beverage per day faced a 2.45 times greater risk of developing gastric cancer than those who seldom touched such drinks.
The association held true for both sexes. Notably, artificially sweetened alternatives showed no comparable elevation in risk.
While earlier research had established connections between these beverages and colorectal, breast and liver cancers, evidence regarding their relationship with stomach cancer had until now remained scant.
The study drew on data from 112,284 individuals enrolled in two long-running American health surveys — the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
Both programmes collected comprehensive dietary, lifestyle and medical information over several decades. During the monitoring period, 278 participants received a gastric cancer diagnosis.
"This is the first study to demonstrate an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and gastric cancer in a U.S. population," said senior author Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute.
"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 sheer scale of the cohort and the depth of information gathered lent the research considerable statistical weight.
The risk appeared particularly pronounced among women. In the Nurses' Health Study subset, those who consumed more than one sugary drink daily faced a 3.04-fold greater likelihood of developing stomach cancer compared with those who rarely did so.
Higher overall fructose intake — the principal sweetener found in these beverages — was similarly tied to increased gastric cancer incidence. By contrast, when other variables were accounted for, artificially sweetened drinks bore no association with elevated risk.
For the purposes of the research, sugar-sweetened beverages encompassed fizzy drinks, punch, lemonade and sports drinks. Artificially sweetened options were classified as low-calorie carbonated beverages.
The divergence between the two categories suggests that sugar itself, rather than carbonation or other shared characteristics, may be the pertinent factor.
The researchers acknowledged several caveats. As an observational study, it cannot definitively establish that sugary drinks cause stomach cancer — other unmeasured factors may play a role.
The participant pool was also overwhelmingly white, which constrained the team's ability to examine variations across different racial and ethnic groups.
To explore whether the bacterial infection Helicobacter pylori might explain the link, scientists checked infection status in a subset of 940 participants.
Roughly a third showed evidence of H. pylori, yet no connection between sugary drink consumption and infection was found.
Information on family history of gastric cancer was likewise limited. The authors stressed that further investigation is required both to corroborate these results and to unravel the biological mechanisms that might underpin the association.
