Soda was a rare treat when Richmond Aryeetey was growing up in Ghana in the 1980s.
"You were likely to see soda in the house maybe on festive occasions" – like Christmas, he says.
Now, he says, soda is a regular thing. For some children, buying a sugary drink for snack or lunch is part of their everyday routine at school. "There's advertising on TV, on videogames and on billboards," Aryeetey says. "So it's like in your face everywhere. In a sense, you become sort of helpless."
This push for soda has brewed the "perfect storm," says Aryeetey, who's today a public health nutritionist at University of Ghana.
A vast new study underscores his point. The news isn't that soda is bad for you – that's long been known – researchers say it's easy to gulp down more sugar in its liquid form than we realize. And the empty calories can increase your risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer.
But this report brings in an unprecedented set of data to explore the consequences of soda drinking. Past research has used national estimates of sugar consumption instead of individual reports. But this new effort draws from the Global Dietary Database, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which is a funder of NPR and this blog). The database provided 450 surveys covering 2.9 million people in 118 countries. The self-reported data, they say, provides a more accurate picture – although they also acknowledge that people often under-report their sugar consumption.
The research model also incorporated previous research showing how sugary drinks contribute to conditions like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. While the study can't definitively say sugary drinks like soda cause these health problems, it models some of the global impact of our increasing consumption of sugar.
The study, by researchers at Tufts University and published in Nature Medicine, estimates that sugary drinks like soda and energy drinks contributed to over 330,000 deaths and 3 million new cases of diabetes and heart disease combined in 2020. That's nearly twice the estimate made in a 2010 study that looked at deaths from sugary drinks.
"That's a lot of suffering," says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a study author and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University. "I think our results really highlight this is not a small deal."
The team's study shows this growing wave of soda-linked health issues is concentrated in certain regions. Since 1990, sub-Saharan Africa has had the biggest increases – with Type 2 diabetes rising by 8%, while heart disease went up over 4%.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, where the study found cases of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease have remained relatively high in the last few decades, sugary drinks contributed to nearly a quarter of new diabetes cases in 2020.
The study also offers an idea of just how much soda is being consumed. In Colombia, for example, according to supplementary data in the study, people drank an estimated 17 servings of sugary drinks each week – or over two 8-ounce glasses a day.
For study author Laura Lara-Castor, a nutritional epidemiologist at University of Washington, that kind of statistic is evidence that measures to drive down soda consumption – like taxes targeting sugary beverages – are needed.
Copyright 2025 NPR