Today a report issued on the Reuters Health news service told us that "Sodas Raise Cancer Risk" according to a U.S. "study." How could this be, and upon what evidence is this assertion based?
Don't ask.
The meeting at which this alarm was raised went unnamed in the press report, but occurred in New Orleans and is devoted to the intersection of diet and cancer, apparently.
A team of researchers at the Tata Memorial Hospital in India (not Indiana, please note) found that the rate of esophageal cancer -- a highly lethal type of cancer -- has increased over the past fifty years and so has the rate of soda consumption. This correlation was discerned with the aid of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, confirming the alarming rise in soda drinking among American men (the data on women, soda, and esophageal cancer are not as incriminating, it appears).
This news is based on nothing more rigorous than this correlation. I wonder what other cancers have risen over the same period that the authors might then blame on soda?
But wait! Why just soda? What other behaviors have increased at least as dramatically as soda intake over this period, which might have led to the current epidemic of esophageal cancer? (OK, so 13,900 cancers may not meet everyone's definition of an "epidemic," but as long as we're going for a Big Scare, why not go all the way?) How about driving...I bet we've been driving a lot more over that period. And of course, there's oil consumption, cigarettes (which are handy to have around, since they are already known to be linked to esophageal cancer anyway), hot dogs maybe, artificial sweeteners, childhood vaccines (another favorite target of technophobes, albeit without any evidence at all to indicate a connection to any known disease)...
I could go on.
How do "researchers" get to present junk like this, even if it only a meeting, which is admittedly a step down from a peer-reviewed scientific journal (or three steps down, in this case)? The authors/presenters here have violated one of the prime rules of epidemiology, falling for the ancient fallacy "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," which means: if event B occurs after event A, then clearly event A caused event B. Not so.
The real culprit here is the gullible or just plain stupid "health reporter" who wrote this story and the editor who allowed it to be published on their site. When will so-called health and science reporters learn the difference between a real science story and silly alarmism?
So let's put the soda-cancer link in the waste bin of scares, where so many have gone before.
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Medical and Executive Director of the American Council on Science and Health.
