NEW ORLEANS – There's a warning for women who like sugary soft drinks. A local doctor is the first to find a link between those beverages and the future health of you and your children.
It is the first study of its kind – and the news is not good for young women who want to have babies. Drinking sugary colas can significantly increase your chances of getting diabetes during pregnancy.
"[They] have increased risk of gestational diabetes," said LSU Health Sciences Center Epidemiologist Dr. Liwei Chen.
Chen is the lead author on a paper published in the current issue of a medical journal called “Diabetes Care,” and her study of nearly 14,000 women finds that women who have a regular dietary habit of drinking just five sugar-sweetened colas a week, even before they get pregnant, have a 22 percent greater chance of getting gestational diabetes.
"And for this particular study, we followed those women for about 10 years," Chen said.
Previous studies find that you are unlikely to change your regular dietary habits when you find out you're pregnant.
"Most likely they drink a lot of those cola before pregnancy and they continue to drink a lot of cola after pregnancy," Chen said.
And what makes the problem worse is that the age group that consumes the most sugary colas is 19- to 39-year-olds, women right in the middle of their child bearing years.
"It's long term consequences we are seeing," Chen said.
And the consequences for women who do get gestational diabetes are:
- Illness during pregnancy
- The possibility of a larger baby, meaning complications during delivery.
- The increased chance of needing a C-section
- More likely to develop type 2 diabetes later on.
Then those babies are more at risk for obesity and getting diabetes themselves early on.
More research is needed because right now the study suggests that only dark sugary colas are causing the increased risk of gestational diabetes.
"We don't know why. We can not answer this question right now. That's a very interesting question," Chen said.
But doctors still say that all color sugary soft drinks and fruity drinks, the ones that are mostly sugar and water with not much real fruit juice in them, have little nutritional value. So Chen said being aware of problems down the road gives you more time to make those dietary changes now.
Previous studies in children and adults have shown that drinking sugary drinks on a regular basis is tied to weight gain, type 2 diabetes and other metabolism health problems.
