BROKEN BONES & COLAS.Active teenage girls who drink colas are more likely to break a bone than active girls who don't drink colas, says a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health The Harvard School of Public Health is (colloquially, HSPH) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Longwood Area of the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Mission Hill, next to Harvard Medical School and Cambridge, Massachusetts, . Grace Wyshak and colleagues asked 460 ninth- and tenth-grade girls about their history of broken bones This article or section has multiple issues: * It does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by citing reliable sources. * It needs to be expanded. Please help [ improve the article] or discuss these issues on the talk page. , how active they were, and whether they drank carbonated beverages carbonated beverage, an effervescent drink that releases carbon dioxide under conditions of normal atmospheric pressure. Carbonation may occur naturally in spring water that has absorbed carbon dioxide at high pressures underground. . The 164 girls who were the most active were no more likely to drink colas than the others. But active girls who drank colas were five times more likely to have broken a bone than active girls who drank no cola. The link was much weaker for less active girls. Why might colas weaken bones? "I believe it's the phosphoric acid phosphoric acid, any one of three chemical compounds made up of phosphorus, oxygen, and hydrogen (see acids and bases). The most common, orthophosphoric acid, H3PO4, is usually simply called phosphoric acid. in the colas, but we can't say with certainty," says Wyshak. The study has limitations, she acknowledges. It didn't measure bone density, didn't ask how much soda the girls drank, and isn't the kind of study that can prove cause-and-effect. Nevertheless, the results warrant further research. "Adolescence is a critical time for bone development," says Wyshak. "How much bone you have when you're older is related to the peak bone mass you reach in adolescence." And less bone when you're older means a greater risk of osteoporosis osteoporosis (ŏs'tēō'pərō`sĭs), disorder in which the normal replenishment of old bone tissue is severely disrupted, resulting in weakened bones and increased risk of fracture; osteopenia . |
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