Sugary drinks are the cause of thousands of deaths a year
Published on 23/3/2013
This was the headline of a news item that appeared online on Affari Italiani: fizzy-drink alarm for 23 million Italians. An alarm from the United States: in 2010 sugary drinks caused more than 180,000 deaths. In Italy almost 23 million people say they drink fizzy beverages, and of these about 6.5 million say they do so regularly. Coldiretti is calling for the immediate implementation of the "Balduzzi" health law passed by parliament, which requires the percentage of juice in soft drinks to be raised from 12 percent to 20 percent.
The content reveals that, according to a Censis-Coldiretti survey, as many as 6.5 million Italians regularly drink sugary beverages. This figure is set against the alarm raised by the global mega-study presented at the scientific sessions of the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 meeting being held in New Orleans; in it, it is hypothesized that every year worldwide 180,000 deaths a year are linked to the consumption of sugary drinks because of chronic degenerative diseases mostly tied to obesity, such as diabetes (133,000), cardiovascular disease (44,000) and cancer (6,000).
On the basis of these data, Coldiretti is calling for the immediate implementation of the "Balduzzi"health law passed by parliament, which requires the percentage of juice in soft drinks to be raised from 12 percent to 20 percent. A halt to orange drinks without oranges, with the aim of making beverages healthier and reaching an estimated increase in orange consumption of 200 million more oranges a year on the part of Italians.
Still according to Coldiretti, in Italy the potential health problems caused by the consumption of sugary drinks are magnified by a dangerous abandonment of the basic principles of the Mediterranean diet, which has until now guaranteed Italians an average life expectancy of 79.4 years for men and 84.5 for women. But Coldiretti recalls how household consumption has changed: over the course of 2012, for many Italians fresh fish fell by 3 percent, the same can be said for wine, a -2 percent was recorded for fruit and vegetables and a -1 percent for olive oil, while the consumption of pasta increased (+1 percent).