Study links daily sugary drinks to nearly triple stomach cancer risk

BOSTON - Drinking one or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day was linked to nearly triple the risk of stomach cancer compared with drinking fewer than one a month, according to a Mass General Brigham analysis covered by Fox News.

After researchers accounted for other risk factors, daily sugary-drink consumers showed about 2.45 times the gastric cancer risk of people who rarely drank them. Among women who had more than one sugary drink daily, the association was even stronger, more than a threefold increase in the reported rates.

The team used long-running Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study data covering more than 100,000 participants. Sugar-sweetened drinks were defined as regular sodas, fruit punches, lemonade, and sports beverages sweetened mainly with fructose. Higher fructose intake tracked with higher stomach cancer occurrence.

Artificially sweetened drinks, including diet sodas, were not linked to higher gastric cancer risk in the same cohort. Senior author Dr. Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, told Fox News Digital that gastrointestinal cancers are rising in people under 50 and that sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods may be part of that trend.

Stomach cancer is strongly tied to Helicobacter pylori infection. In a subset of participants, sugary-drink intake was not connected to H. pylori status, which the authors said supports looking at sugar itself as a separate factor.

The work was observational and published in Gastro Hep Advances. It cannot prove cause and effect. Participants were mostly White health professionals, so results need testing in broader groups. Chan said more research is required before calling the link causal. Still, CDC figures cited in the report say about 63 percent of U.S. adults consume a sugar-sweetened beverage at least once a day, which makes the association worth a hard look at the dinner table.