Not good news if you enjoy that can of soda pop with your sandwich every day.
As with most things in life, it's all about moderation, but if you happen to chug down fizzy drinks on the reg, then you'll know already that you should probably cut down. However, maybe you don't know that the amount of sugar you're taking on as a result is aging you significantly.
In a study published in the Journal of Public Health, a study of 5,300 adults separated people in to two groups, those who drink soda every day and those who didn't partake in fizzy drinks and then examined their cells. What they found was "the ends of the chromosomes—known as telomeres—were shorter, a sign of their cells' diminished ability to regenerate".
Telomeres naturally shorten as we get older, it's a sign of aging, but in the group that enjoyed a lot of fizzy drinks, that process was occurring faster. How much faster? Well the study found that drinking a 20-oz (just over 500ml) fizzy drink every day was enough to age you by 4.6 years - the same amount as a smoker.
Elissa Epel PhD told Time that taking on such a high amount of sugar was "uniquely toxic" to the metabolism, which makes for some grim reading. However, since the effect seems to be caused by sugar, those who drank the diet versions of the fizzy drinks or had fruit juice instead were not affected.
Via Time and MotherJones. Main pic via John/Flickr