10/11/2025
Diet drinks Triple Your Dementia Risk While Shrinking Your Brain
The drink I’m talking about… is diet soda.
It’s weird because most people think it’s the healthier choice.
But the Framingham Heart Study followed more than 4,000 adults for about 10 years…
And found that people who drank one or more diet sodas a day…
Had about three times higher risk of stroke and dementia compared to those who didn’t.
The surprising part is their brain scans.
People who drank diet sodas had smaller brains… meaning less total brain volume or their brains shrank!
Especially in the hippocampus, the memory center.
Their brains even looked years older.
Background and Purpose—Sugar- and artificially-sweetened beverage intake have been linked to cardiometabolic risk factors, which increase the risk of cerebrovascular disease and dementia. We examined whether sugar- or artificially sweetened beverage consumption was associated with the prospective ...
