New research links soda pop to earlier puberty among girls, breast cancer

A poster for a Drop the Pop promotion in Nunavut for Kik, a single serving, drinkable yogurt beverage.

Soft drinks like Coca-Cola or other sodas are already known to contribute to Nunavut’s high rates of extreme tooth decay and obesity among children.

But now there’s yet another reason to steer young girls in Nunavut towards more nutritious beverages — drinking more than one soft drink a day may lead them to earlier puberty and later, this may also increase their risk of developing breast cancer.

“Our findings provide further support for public health efforts to reduce the consumption of sugary drinks,” Karin Michels from the Harvard Medical School, who led the research, said in a Jan. 26 news release on its publication.

Girls who frequently consume sugary drinks tend to start their menstrual periods earlier than girls who do not, says research published Jan. 28 in the journal Human Reproduction.

In this first research study to look at the relation between sugar-sweetened drinks and the age at which girls have their first period, researchers followed 5,583 girls in the United States, aged nine to 14 years, between 1996 and 2001.

They found that those who drank more than 1.5 servings of sugary drinks a day had their first period 2.7 months earlier than those who consumed two or fewer sugary drinks a week.

This held true independent of the girls’ weight, height, total food intake and other lifestyle factors such as physical activity, the release said.

The new study also links how starting periods earlier is linked to an increased risk of breast cancer later in life, said a Jan. 26 news release from the Oxford University Press on the research published in its journal, Human Reproduction

A one-year decrease in age when a girl gets her first period is estimated to increase the risk of breast cancer by five per cent, so even a 2.7 month-decrease the age when she gets her first period likely has a modest impact on breast cancer risk, the release said.

These new findings could be important for Nunavut, where people consume huge quantities of soft drinks.

An unrelated research study from Nunavut found many in Pangnirtung regularly downed two cans of soft drinks a day.

And, in 2013, people in Kimmirut collected 80,000 used soft drink cans, enough to fill sealift containers, that is, about 160 cans for every person — elder, woman, man, child and baby in the community for the Arctic Co-operatives Ltd.’s can recycling effort. an ACL manager suggested that Iqaluit could potentially fill 14 sealift containers with its used soft drink cans — some 560,000 cans.

For their study, researchers used questionnaires to ask the girls about their diet at several points, including how frequently, on average, they drank a serving of different types of drinks: one can or glass of soda or diet soda (soda being carbonated soft drinks such as colas), one glass of non-carbonated fruit drinks (fruit mixes such as lemonade, punch and other non-carbonated fruit drinks), or one glass, can or bottle of sweetened ice tea.

All of these drinks have sugar added to them in the form of sucrose, glucose or corn syrup while the colas and iced tea also contain caffeine.

The researchers also investigated diet sodas and fruit juice to assess the impact of these artificially or naturally sweetened drinks.

But they found diet sodas and fruit juices were not associated with any difference in the age at which girls started their periods.

The average age of the first period among girls consuming the most sugary drinks was 12.8 years, compared to 13 years for those drinking the least.

Greater caffeine intake has also been associated with earlier periods.

However, the researchers found that total sugar or caffeine intake did not explain their results, and that it was the added sugar in drinks that was the culprit.

They also suggested that’s because drinks with added sugar can result in a rapid increase in insulin concentrations in the body.

And higher insulin concentrations can result in higher concentrations of sex hormones. Big changes in these hormones have been linked to periods starting earlier.

Nunavut started a “Drop the pop” campaign with schools in 2004 in an effort to decrease the consumption of soft drinks by the territory’s students — but a 2011 evaluation on the campaign offered only participation numbers and no information about whether or not students were actually drinking fewer soft drinks.