What studies show about sugary drinks and bad hair days

Drinking sugar-sweetened beverages daily increases the risk of chronic liver disease and liver cancer for older women.

That’s according to a new study in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which looked at almost 100,000 postmenopausal women for an average of 20 years to see differences between what happened to women with low levels of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption (three times or less a month) and those who had such beverages daily. They also considered outcomes for those who instead drank beverages with artificial sweeteners.

The risk for those consuming sugar-sweetened drinks daily was “significantly higher” in terms of liver cancer or death from chronic liver disease, based on findings from the multi-clinic study.

To help quantify the risk, the researchers note that 65% of U.S. adults drink beverages sweetened with sugar every day.

The study followed 98,786 women ages 50 to 79 enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative between 1993 and 1998 for an average of more than 20 years.

About 7% of participants said they drank sugar-sweetened beverages daily, while 13% said they drank artificially sweetened beverages every day.

Daily consumption of drinks with artificial sweeteners did not impact liver disease risk compared to those who drank them less often.

“I think this provides clearly another piece of evidence of the potential negative effects on our health of consuming sugar-sweetened beverages,” Karina Lora, assistant professor of exercise and nutrition sciences at George Washington University who was not involved in the study, told CNN. “It provides another clue that a good diet or good dietary pattern is important even much more as we age.”

The study did not look at a possible association with men or with different ages.

In other research news . . .

Behavior and choices have a big impact on folks and their lives. But genetics has major influence in ways big and small, too.

If you’re having a bad hair day, you want to blame your mom or dad, as another recent study shows.

When researchers mapped human scalp hair whorls, they found that the direction has a genetic basis and that multiple genes play a part. The researchers identified four genetic variants believed to contribute to how your hair curls and behaves.

The study is published in Elsevier’s Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

According to Elsevier’s news release on Science Daily, “A hair whorl is a patch of hair growing in a circular pattern around a point specified by hair follicle orientations. As an easily observed human trait, scalp hair whorl pattern is typically defined by the whorl number (single or double whorl) and whorl direction (e.g., clockwise, counterclockwise, or diffuse).”

The subjects of the genome-wide association study were 2,149 Chinese people in the National Survey of Physical Traits. The researchers then did another study using 1,950 Chinese people from the Taizhou Longitudinal Study to replicate their findings.

The research quoted lead investigator Sijia Wang of the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences: “We know very little about why we look like we do. Our group has been looking for the genes underlying various interesting traits of physical appearance, including fingerprint patterns, eyebrow thickness, earlobe shape and hair curliness. Hair whorl is one of the traits that we were curious about.”

Researchers expected to learn a single gene determined hair whorl direction, so they were surprised, Wang said. He also noted that previous studies suggested “associations between hair whorl patterns and abnormal neurological development,” but they didn’t find such a link.

Wang continued, “While previous work proposed the hypothesis of associations between hair whorl patterns and abnormal neurological development, no significant genetic associations were observed between hair whorl direction and behavioral, cognitive or neurological phenotypes. Although we still know very little about why we look like we do, we are confident that curiosity will eventually drive us to the answers.”