LOS ANGELES — New research raises concern about diet soda, finding higher risks for strokes and heart attacks among people who drink it every day versus those who drink no soda at all.
The beverage findings should be “a wakeup call to pay attention to diet sodas,” said Dr. Steven Greenberg. He is a Harvard Medical School neurologist and vice chairman of the International Stroke Conference in California, where the research was presented Wednesday.
A simple solution, health experts say, is to drink water instead.
Doctors have no chemical or biological explanation for why diet soda may be risky. It could be that people who drink lots of it also fail to exercise, weigh more, drink more alcohol or have other risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.
However, the researchers took these and many other factors into account and didn’t see a change in the trend.
“It’s reasonable to have doubts because we don’t have a clear mechanism. This needs to be viewed as a preliminary study,” said lead researcher Hannah Gardener of the University of Miami.
But for those trying to cut calories, “diet soft drinks may not be an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages,” she said.
The same study also found higher risks for those consuming more than 1,500 milligrams of salt a day — the limit the American Heart Association recommends. Researchers found that stroke risk rose 16 percent for every 500 milligrams of salt consumed each day. Those who took in 4,000 or more milligrams of salt had more than 2.5 times greater risk of stroke than those who limited themselves to 1,500 milligrams.
A teaspoon of salt contains about 2,300 milligrams of sodium. About three-fourths of the salt we eat, though, comes from processed foods, especially tomato sauce, soups, condiments and canned foods.
