Daily sugary drinks are getting a hard look after a major new study tied them to a much higher risk of stomach cancer. The research points to fructose-heavy beverages like soda, fruit punch, lemonade, and sports drinks as the main concern, while diet drinks did not show the same signal. It also raises fresh questions about how modern eating habits may be shaping cancer trends, especially as gastrointestinal cancers keep showing up in younger adults.
One of the biggest takeaways is simple and unsettling: people who drank one or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day had nearly triple the risk of gastric cancer compared with those who had less than one serving a month. That kind of jump gets attention fast, especially because sugary drinks are still a routine part of life for many Americans. CDC data says about 63% of U.S. adults drink them at least once a day.
The study drew on more than 100,000 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, two long-running cohorts that track diet and disease over time. Researchers looked at how beverage habits lined up with cancer outcomes and then adjusted for other known risk factors. Even after that, the link between frequent sugary drink intake and stomach cancer still stood out.
Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute in Boston, said the finding matters because stomach and other gastrointestinal cancers are becoming more common in people under 50. “It’s definitely a concern because we are seeing an increase in cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, particularly in young people [under] 50,” he said. “Our increasing consumption of sugary drinks and also ultra-processed foods is likely to be contributing to some of these cancer trends,” he added.
The biology behind stomach cancer has long been tied to Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the stomach lining and is a major known risk factor. But the new analysis adds another layer, since no connection was found between sugary drink intake and H. pylori in a subset of participants. That makes researchers think sugar, especially fructose, may be playing a separate role.
That detail matters because the beverages in question are everywhere. Regular sodas, fruit punches, sports drinks, and similar sweetened drinks all tend to rely on fructose as the main sweetener, and the study found higher fructose consumption tracked with greater stomach cancer risk. The risk was even more pronounced among women who drank more than one sugary beverage per day, where the increase topped threefold.
Not every drink category looked the same. Artificially sweetened drinks, including diet sodas and other low-calorie carbonated beverages, were not linked to a higher risk of gastric cancer in the study population. That distinction may be important for people trying to cut back without giving up fizz altogether.
Still, the findings come with a built-in caution. This was an observational study, so it can show a strong association but not prove that sugary drinks directly cause stomach cancer. The participants were also mostly White healthcare professionals, which means the results need to be checked in more diverse groups before anyone treats them like the final word.
Chan was careful about that point, saying, “The study is unable to really prove cause and effect,” and adding, “What we did see was an association. We certainly need to do more research to understand whether this association between sugary-sweetened beverages and stomach cancer is truly causal.” Even with that caution, the message lands hard, because the drink sitting in the cup may be more than just empty calories. The habit itself could be carrying a risk that has been hiding in plain sight.
