Wang et al. (2022) estimated 250 mL/​day more of SSBs is associated with a 7 % higher chance of death. What is your best guess for which fraction of this is causal? I have also asked the 1st 2 authors. I would like to estimate the expected decrease in human-years due to consuming SSBs.
It would be hard to say without diving deeper into the literature—the way we did it was to look at the number of diabetes DALYs that is causally attributable to SSB consumption, and then just taking consumption and the DALY burden to vary linearly.
The virtue of this approach is its greater simplicity, particularly because it’s complicated to get from higher mortality risk to DALY (you have to do a bunch of additional calculations and transformations to get from relative risk and baseline rates and average years of life remaining to years of life loss, and failure to disaggregate into age and sex specific stuff at each stage introduces issues iirc), so might as well just do the population-level analysis.
Hi Joel,
Wang et al. (2022) estimated 250 mL/​day more of SSBs is associated with a 7 % higher chance of death. What is your best guess for which fraction of this is causal? I have also asked the 1st 2 authors. I would like to estimate the expected decrease in human-years due to consuming SSBs.
Hi Vasco,
It would be hard to say without diving deeper into the literature—the way we did it was to look at the number of diabetes DALYs that is causally attributable to SSB consumption, and then just taking consumption and the DALY burden to vary linearly.
The virtue of this approach is its greater simplicity, particularly because it’s complicated to get from higher mortality risk to DALY (you have to do a bunch of additional calculations and transformations to get from relative risk and baseline rates and average years of life remaining to years of life loss, and failure to disaggregate into age and sex specific stuff at each stage introduces issues iirc), so might as well just do the population-level analysis.
Thanks for the context, Joel!