New Delhi: Artificially sweetened drinks are not that safe as we believe. Post-menopausal women who drink two or more diet beverages containing artificial sweetners a day appear to be at higher risk of strokes and heart disease compared with women who have less than one drink a week, scientists said. Their study has found that women who consumed two or more artificially sweetened beverages a day were 23 per cent more likely to suffer a stroke, 31 per cent more likely to have a stroke caused by a clot, and 29 per cent more likely to develop heart diseases.
The research, described as among the first to probe the connection between artificially sweetened beverages and specific types of stroke, involved tracking the health of over 81,700 post-menopausal women aged between 50 and 79 years in the US for over a decade. For instance, women without previous heart disease or diabetes who drank two or more diet beverages a day were 2.4 times more likely to suffer from a clot in the brain’s small arteries than women who had less than one drink a week. Obese women without previous heart disease or diabetes were two times more likely to have a clot-induced stroke, according to the study published in the journal Stroke.
“Our research and other studies have shown that artificially sweetened beverages may not be harmless and high consumption is associated with a higher risk of stroke,” Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani, associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and the lead author of the study.
