Actual Non-Clickbait Academic Study: Pop Can Kill You

So maybe you've tried that science experiment where you leave a penny in a glass of Coke for a little while, and then when you take the penny out, it's really shiny because of a chemical reaction between copper in the penny and phosphoric acid in the Coke. And maybe you've found this a little bit unsettling. Well, here's more bad news: A group of scientists who are not fourth graders but instead full-grown PhDs in universities across Europe have published the results of a long-term study that shows a direct correlation between consumption of pop and death through circulatory and digestive diseases.

Yep, it's true. Soda pop can kill you.

The study, published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine, confirms other previous studies about the evils of pop. The researchers tracked 451 ,743 people in 10 European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K.) from 1992 through 2000. On average, they were about 50 years old and 71% were women. The researchers excluded anyone who already had cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, or had previously suffered a stroke and anyone whose reported daily food intake was deemed "implausible." By the time the researchers did a follow-up between 11 and 19 years later (the time span varied by country), 41, 693 of the study participants had died. The researchers discovered that the deceased were more likely to have consumed two or more glasses of pop per day.

But what about diet pop?, you ask. Well, heavy diet soda drinkers ("heavy" is two or more glasses per day) were even more likely to die of digestive and circulatory diseases. You just can't win. You can either die or live with heartbreak.