Data from the large and very long-running Framingham Heart Study has revealed that people who drink sugary drinks frequently are more likely to have poorer memory, smaller overall brain volume, and a significantly smaller hippocampus. Moreover, a second study found that those who drank diet soda daily were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia over a 10-year period, compared to those who didn’t – suggesting that substituting artificial sweeteners for the sugar doesn’t make matters better.
Age, smoking, diet quality, and other factors were taken into account, but the analysis couldn’t completely control for preexisting conditions like diabetes. Diabetics tend to drink more diet soda on average, as a way to limit their sugar consumption, and some of the correlation between diet soda intake and dementia may be due to diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia.
Reference:
Pase, M. P., Himali, J. J., Jacques, P. F., DeCarli, C., Satizabal, C. L., Aparicio, H., Vasan, R. S., Beiser, A. S., & Seshadri, S. (2017). Sugary beverage intake and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease in the community. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 13(9), 955–964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jalz.2017.01.024
Pase Matthew P., Himali Jayandra J., Beiser Alexa S., Aparicio Hugo J., Satizabal Claudia L., Vasan Ramachandran S., Seshadri Sudha, & Jacques Paul F. (2017). Sugar- and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and the Risks of Incident Stroke and Dementia. Stroke, 48(5), 1139–1146. https://doi.org/10.1161/STROKEAHA.116.016027
