Beware Of This Popular Drink That Causes High Cholesterol

We have known that these drinks are bad for our health for a while. During the last decade medical professionals have hammered home how they increase the risk of diabetes, but that is where the research ends.

Now, The Journal of the American Heart Association has published an even more worrying link related to these popular beverages – they cause unhealthy cholesterol profiles as well.

This is serious business. Especially since having high cholesterol drastically increases other health-related problems, namely strokes and cardiovascular disease.

Sugary drinks are the offenders. These, of course, include sodas, but also other drinks with added sugar like fruit punches and sweetened fruit juices.

Researchers examined the data of 3,146 participants who joined between 1991 and 2014, and 3,584 participants who joined between 2002 and 2011. The first cohort were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, while the second cohort were in their 40s.

The data included information on cholesterol at enrollment and at subsequent examinations every four years over a 12-year period.

In the older cohort, they discovered that those who drank one or more sugary drinks per day were 98 percent more likely to have low HDL cholesterol and 53 percent more likely to have high triglycerides.

High triglycerides are unhealthy because they are fats in our blood that might become trapped in our blood vessel walls with LDL cholesterol.

Low HDL cholesterol is bad because this type of cholesterol is meant to remove unhealthy LDL-cholesterol to our livers where it is broken down and excreted.

If you have both high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol, you have a condition called dyslipidemia that causes heart and blood vessel damage over some years, suggesting our attachment to sugary drinks gradually worsens our cholesterol profiles the longer we drink them.

There was no conclusive evidence found with natural fruit juices and diet soda, but the authors suggest drinking water to remain hydrated instead.

Drinking water instead of soda is a good start, but to avoid high cholesterol problems completely, and reverse its effects, you need to cut out this ONE ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming.