Interesting Links for 26-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• Each can of sugary drink per day increases your chances of diabetes by 22%
  (tags: diet diabetes sugar )
• Kari Sperring - Why I started #Womentoread
  (tags: fiction writing women )
• Suicide: Probably not something you want to use to advertise your cars.
  (tags: epicwtf advertising suicide )
• BT (and TalkTalk) manage to exceed their usual appalling

Comments

[bohemiancoast]

The sugary drink research is very interesting. The obvious counter -- drinking soft drinks every day is correlated with other life-shortening behaviour -- is partly addressed in the article, in that when they corrected for BMI the added risk went down to 18%. The fact that it's European research is interesting, because European soft drinks are mostly sweetened with sugar, not the US corn product high-fructose corn syrup. This research also helps to answer the question 'is HFCS worse for you than sugar' (answer, possibly not).

Just how much soft drink is this? Coke is the top seller, and sells about £1Bn/per year. So I think we can safely say the entire UK market for soft drinks is no more than £20Bn a year, and that probably represents about 20bn litres of soft drink, or, hmm, roughly a can per person per day. So this might be average consumption, or not much more than average. Though I guess there are quite a lot of people who don't drink any, or very little, and quite a lot who drink buckets.

But it still doesn't really address other confounding factors, like making healthy lifestyle choices generally. Of the 18% difference we have to account for, the 10% of people who make seriously healthy choices in food and exercise all the time probably delivers half the difference. They aren't drinking a can of soft drink a day, though if they're drinking "sports" drinks they're probably not much better.

Hrrm.