Your Daily Diet Soda Habit May Be Linked to Dementia

People who drink soda and sugary juices on a regular basis have smaller brains and accelerated signs of brain aging, according to a recent study. But artificially sweetened beverages may not be any better for your mind: In a second study, people who drank diet soda every day were there times as likely to have a stroke or develop dementia than those who didn’t.

In other words, there’s not much of an upside to drinking sugary sodas—and swapping them for artificial sweeteners doesn’t seem to help. The new research can’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between drinking habits and health effects, but it does strongly suggest a connection, says Matthew Pase, PhD, a neurology fellow at Boston University School of Medicine and contributing author on both new papers.

Excerpted from realsimple.com

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