Best put down that can of soda.

• Position: Sugar-Related Deaths

Soda is as American as baseball and apple pie, but it is not just Americans anymore who think it is the real thing. Thanks to extensive advertising campaigns and sometimes the lack of clean municipal water, soda pop, sports drinks, and other sugary beverages have become the refreshment of choice in much of the world, resulting in ever higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, enough to result in an extra 184,000 deaths per year globally, according to research by Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Medford, Mass.

"Since this is a single food category without any health benefit, it is a natural thing to eliminate from our diets," she maintains. "Other efforts to improve health, like lowering sodium or decreasing added sugar, are all feasible, but complicated. You'd need to have replacements; you'd have to think about taste or safety and so on--but sugar-sweetened beverages can simply be cut out and replaced with seltzer or water or milk. It's ironically a so-called low-hanging fruit for nutrition and public health policy.

"Of course, this is just one part of the food supply, and eliminating sugar-sweetened beverages will not eliminate all diet-related illnesses or obesity. It will have an important impact, but won't be a magic bullet that's going to solve all diet-related problems. Yet, this is a simple and straightforward first step."

Mozaffarian adds: "Another important finding was the very high proportion of obesity- and diabetes-related deaths attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages among younger people--under age 45--in many countries. In the U.S., for example, about 10% of all obesity- and diabetes-related deaths under age 45 were attributed to sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. That's a remarkably high proportion.

"We...