Daily sugary drinks linked to 2.45x higher gastric cancer risk in major study

A study spanning decades and tracking more than 112,000 American adults has found a striking correlation: people who drink at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily face roughly two and a half times the risk of developing gastric cancer compared with those who rarely consume such drinks. The research, published in Gastro Hep Advances, represents the first time scientists have documented this particular association in a U.S. population.

The work drew on two long-running health studies—the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study—which collected detailed dietary and lifestyle information from participants over many years. During the extended follow-up period, 278 of those participants developed gastric cancer. Researchers then examined whether patterns in beverage consumption correlated with who got sick. After accounting for other factors that influence cancer risk, the numbers became difficult to ignore. Daily consumers of sugary drinks showed a 2.45-fold increase in gastric cancer risk. Among women specifically, the association was even steeper: those drinking more than one sugar-sweetened beverage per day had a 3.04-fold higher risk than women who almost never drank them.

The category of sugar-sweetened beverages included carbonated soft drinks, punch, lemonade, and sports drinks—the everyday drinks millions of Americans consume without much thought. Interestingly, artificially sweetened beverages showed no similar link to gastric cancer risk, even when researchers adjusted for other variables. Higher overall consumption of fructose, the primary sweetener in these drinks, also correlated with greater gastric cancer incidence.

Gastric cancer ranks as the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, yet relatively little has been known about how diet might shape a person's risk. Earlier research had already connected sugar-sweetened beverages to higher rates of colorectal, breast, and liver cancers, but the stomach remained largely unexplored territory. Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute who led the research, emphasized the novelty of the finding: this is the first study to demonstrate such an association in an American population.

The researchers also investigated whether Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium known to increase gastric cancer risk, might explain the connection. Among the 940 participants for whom H. pylori status was available, slightly more than one-third showed evidence of infection. However, the team found no association between sugary beverage consumption and H. pylori infection, suggesting the mechanism linking sugar to gastric cancer operates through a different pathway.

Yet the researchers were careful to note what their work cannot prove. This is an observational study—it identifies associations but cannot establish that sugary drinks directly cause gastric cancer. Other unmeasured factors could account for the higher cancer rates among heavy consumers of these beverages. The study population was predominantly white, which limits the ability to determine whether the association holds across different racial and ethnic groups. Information about participants' family histories of gastric cancer was also limited. Still, the sheer size of the cohort and the richness of health and dietary data collected over decades allowed researchers to account for many other possible risk factors, lending weight to the findings.

Further research will be needed to confirm these results and to understand the biological mechanism that might connect sugar consumption to gastric cancer development. For now, the study adds another piece to a growing body of evidence suggesting that regular consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages carries health costs that extend well beyond weight gain.