Before you crack that next can of soda, you might want to think again. The results are in on a study that followed 5,309 adults for 14 years to see what, if any effect drinking sugary soda had on aging. The study conducted by University of California professor Elissa Epel indicates that high sugar consumption may result in increased aging in the same way regular smoking does.
After analyzing the data, researchers found that people who drank one 8-oz serving per day (i.e. less than a standard 12-oz can) resulted in 1.9 years of additional aging. Consuming 20-oz each day caused about 4.6 extra years of aging, which the authors are keen to point out is the same seen in studies of smoking. Epel arrived at these estimates by tracking the length of telomeres in the participants’ cells.
A telomere is a region of repeating nucleic acid at the end of each chromosome (the white caps below) in the nucleus of your cells. It’s basically extra DNA that doesn’t code for anything and is attached to your important DNA–the stuff that codes for proteins needed to run your cells. The purpose of a telomere is to buffer your genes against loss from the dense environment inside the cell, and also when DNA is replicated. It really all comes down to cell division (mitosis), which is what keeps the biological machine going. You can probably guess how this relates to aging.
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