The comprehensive report on sugary beverages and death does not reflect the effect of such consumption on the health of children.
Today, the left-wing blog ThinkProgress freaked out over a study that linked soda and other sugary drinks to 180,000 deaths globally each year.
Moral: If you drink large sugary beverages, you will die a horrible death.
Vladimir Putin had a nerve writing to the mother of the murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, saying he "shared her sorrow" over her son's death, and then having his sugary words of condolence put on the Kremlin website.
Or if we magically eliminated sugary drinks from Americans' diets, the 25,000 deaths this study links to such drinks wouldn't have happened?
This information, along with data on the health harms of sugary drinks, enabled researchers to estimate the number of deaths attributable to such beverages.
Fruit juice conferred no benefit, while canned fruit appeared to increase the risk of death - possibly because it is stored in sugary syrup, say the researchers.
"The consumption of sugary drinks is a direct causal factor of diabetes and death, making the battle to reduce sugary drink consumption throughout the Americas a critical public health issue," said Alejandro Calvillo of El Poder del Consumidor, the consumer rights group that pushed the Mexican soda tax.
And finally, they calculated how many deaths from those diseases might have gotten a push from consumption of those sugary drinks.
One of the study's co-authors, Gitanjali Singh of the Harvard School of Public Health, said that these tens of thousands of deaths "should impel policy makers to make strong policies to reduce consumption of sugary beverages".
