There’s no strong evidence to link sugar and cancer directly.
However, if you regularly drink sugary drinks, or drink them in large portions you are more likely to be consuming more calories than you burn.
It can be easy to drink too many sugary drinks as they aren’t very filling, despite being quite high in calories. This can lead to weight gain, being overweight and obese, which in turn can cause many cancers.
> Read our Q&A about the artificial sweetener aspartame
Sugary drinks include things like:
> Our recommendation is to limit consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks – find out how
A can contains 330ml and a bottle contains 500ml of sugar-sweetened drinks. The table below shows that, on average, 11–18 year olds are drinking the equivalent of 4 cans of sugar-sweetened drinks a week.
| Age group (years) | Millilitres (ml) of sugar-sweetened drinks consumed by the UK population per day1 |
|---|---|
| 4-10 | 83 |
| 11-18 | 191 |
| 19-64 | 129 |
| 65+ | 40 |
1 Statistics on sugar-sweetened soft drinks come from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey Results from Years 7 and 8 (combined) of the Rolling Programme (2014/2015 – 2015/2016).
