I forgot I had this habit

A while back I stopped drinking soda. Here's why.

Last week, we talked about beer. Today, let’s talk about soda.

I forgot how much soda I used to drink. When I worked at a startup where they just kept stocking the fridge, I was grabbing two or three cans a day -- mostly diet. Then I read the studies cited below, and I flat-out quit. Cold turkey, 100 percent.

Well, O.K., let's say 99 percent. Nobody’s perfect.

Still, Americans drink a lot of soft drinks. Many of us wonder, which is worse: the sugar in regular soda, or the chemicals in diet?

This pair of university studies offered some disquieting answers. I'll be interested to hear if you react the same way I did.

First, the background. Researchers at Boston University produced two studies using data from the Framingham Heart Study, which is the nation's longest-running epidemiological study, dating back to 1948. The Franklin study is credited with helping scientists make many key discoveries about preventing heart disease over the past seven decades.

It's a big pool of data, and it originally focused on 5,209 people living in Framingham, Massachusetts--hence the name--and then picked up the next generation, and the next. By studying their health and habits, researchers have produced more than 1,000 academic papers about how life choices affect health.

The soda researchers used this data to correlate residents' health with whether they drank regular soda, diet soda, or neither. It all resulted in two separate academic studies that came out almost simultaneously. We'll call them the "sugary drinks study" and the "diet drinks study."

The first study, published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia, looked at about 4,000 of the Framingham participants, according to a university press release, identifying those who drank "more than two sugary drinks a day of any type--soda, fruit juice, or other soft drinks--or more than three per week of soda alone."

While most of us would anticipate these people might have had higher BMI or difficulty losing weight, the study found other correlations you might find shocking, because they're about an entirely different part of the body--the brain. Among the correlations:

• Shrunken hippocampus

• Poorer episodic memory

• Smaller overall brain volume

• Multiple signs of accelerated brain aging

All four correlations are "risk factors for early-stage Alzheimer's disease," the summary notes.

Unfortunately, for soda lovers, the news isn't much better if we switch to diet drinks. Writing in the medical journal Stroke, another team of Boston University researchers focused on 4,372 Framingham study participants, looking for those who had either suffered a stroke, or had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

The result? Participants who had drank a single diet soda per day were "almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia."

Again, we are talking about correlation, not necessarily cause and effect. It could be the case, for example, that people who drink lots of soda simply happen to have these kinds of health outcomes for entirely unrelated reasons.

Or, it might be that drinking copious amounts of soda indicates that the subjects also made some other choices, which in turn lead to those health outcomes.

But at least for me personally, as soon as I started reading studies suggesting any connection between either excess sugar or diet soda and dementia--well, it put a quick stop to a casual habit I'd had for decades.

It simply had never occurred to me that extra sugar or things like acesulfame potassium or sucralose or aspartame could potentially mess with your brain.

I mean, your brain!

So what do I drink instead? Water, mainly -- lots of mildly flavored canned seltzer, too. Coffee like it's going out of style, and tea. Red wine some evenings, and a little beer (but not hot, or in a vat).

I acknowledge the latter two beverages aren't optimal either, but at least they're things people have been consuming for centuries. We can state their health effects with some confidence.

Heck, you can even point to benefits when it comes to the red wine, although experts are pulling back on that advice now.

But when it comes to sugary drinks and diet sodas, even if you take these studies at face value, who really knows the effects for sure?

Human beings have only been drinking soda for less than a century; diet soda for far less than that.

As the researchers themselves point out, "more research is needed to determine how--or if--these drinks actually damage the brain, and how much damage may be caused by underlying vascular disease or diabetes."

Again, it's those words: "actually damage the brain."

I simply wasn't willing to take the risk, and so I swore off soda. I'll be curious to hear in the comments how you react.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• A pro-Palestinian activist who took a lead role in last year's student protests at Columbia University in New York City is being held in immigration custody in Louisiana after he was detained over the weekend by ICE agents who said his student visa and green card were being revoked. The Department of Homeland Security said had "led activities aligned to Hamas", without providing details. President Trump weighed in and took credit directly for the arrest. (BBC, BlueSky)

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development and he would move the 18% of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department. (Associated Press)

• We logged every Canadian Black Hawk border flight for 6 weeks. Here's what we found. Short version: 68 four-hour flights, and a single incident of people trying to cross illegally from Canada into the U.S. discovered. (CBC)

• Columnist Ruth Marcus submitted her resignation from The Washington Post on Monday after an op-ed she wrote disagreeing with owner Jeff Bezos’ new mandate for the storied paper’s opinion page was rejected by the Post’s publisher. Marcus said it was the first time in her 40-year career at the Post a column had been rejected. (The Independent)

• A Texas state bill would create a crime of “gender identity fraud,” making it illegal to identify as transgender on official documents. The bill, which was filed last week by Republican state Rep. Tom Oliverson, would make it a state jail felony to “knowingly mak[e] a false or misleading verbal or written statement” by identifying their sex assigned at birth incorrectly to a governmental entity or to their employer. (NBC News)

• How to arrange your room for the best sleep. (Wired)

• Inside the NYC longevity clinic that caters to celebrities and royalty — and is launching a $250K annual membership. "There’s no other place in New York City, or honestly, even around the world that I know of that has all of these newest therapeutics." (NY Post)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Charlie Wollborg on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!