By Erin Schumaker, Carmen Paun, Daniel Payne and Evan Peng

Presented by Kidney Care Access Coalition

Bigger gulps are becoming more the norm. | Getty Images

People are drinking more sugary beverages globally, but whether you reach for one may depend on where you live — and how old you are, according to a study in Nature Communications.

Researchers found that overall consumption of beverages like soda, energy drinks, fruit juice and aguas frescas rose nearly 16 percent between 1990 and 2018.

Still, that rise wasn’t consistent across demographics or regions. The study found trends in Sugary Drink Consumption by adults, including:

— Sweetened beverage consumption was higher among 20- and 30-somethings than among older people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Men tended to drink more sugary beverages than women.

— Trends differed regionally. Between 1990 and 2018, sugary drink consumption rose and then fell in high-income countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, consumption decreased and then increased over the 28 years.

— Sub-Saharan Africa saw the largest increase — 82 percent — in consumption. Education and living in a city versus a rural area also played a role. Highly educated city dwellers from Sub-Saharan Africa drank more sweetened beverages, 12.4 servings a week, than anyone else.

While the study didn’t look at the forces driving consumption trends, the researchers suggest that soda- and food-industry marketing, an association between Western diet and status and access to water might influence who drinks sweetened beverages.

“Soda can reach the farthest places, and in countries where clean water is less accessible, these beverages might be the only thing available to drink at times,” Laura Lara-Castor, study author and Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University, said in a statement.

Why it matters: Frequently drinking sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with health risks like weight gain, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, non-alcoholic liver disease and tooth decay, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Given the disease risk, the World Health Organization recommends taxing sugary beverages to nudge people into drinking them less often. But while 108 countries tax sugary drinks, “strong food industry opposition techniques” have blunted the taxes’ effectiveness, the study authors wrote, citing industry-funded research playing down the health risks and aggressive marketing.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, host Lauren Gardner talks with POLITICO reporter Robert King, who outlines how Medicare will negotiate prices for drugs, beginning with seeking input from patients.

Your optometrist may someday be a robot. | Getty Images

Could you see robots performing your eye exams in the future?

The National Institutes of Health can. It recently awarded $1.2 million to a team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Duke University to expand and refine their robotic eye-examination system.

How it works: The system uses sensors to scan and create a 3D map of the eye’s interior.

The researchers are refining the system so the robot can perform most steps of a traditional eye exam at close range — just 2 centimeters away.

Even so: “Safety is a bit of a new concern,” Kris Hauser, principal study investigator and computer science professor at Illinois, said in a statement. “If a patient’s moving towards the robot, it has to move away. If the patient is swaying, the arm has to match their movement.”

The team plans to use the award to conduct large-scale reliability testing, including developing a robot with a mannequin head that can imitate unpredictable human movements. They’ll use different skin color, hair and facial features to lessen algorithmic bias.

The upshot: Robots performing eye exams could mean faster and more widespread vision screenings, allowing doctors to treat more patients, the researchers said.

The researchers are designing the system for clinical settings like doctors’ offices, but Hauser can imagine them elsewhere. “Something like this could be used in an eyeglass store to scan your eyes for the prescription, or it could give a diagnostic scan in a pharmacy and forward the information to your doctor,” he said.

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People are most eager to get vaccinated if they think it will protect others, a new study found. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

As Covid-19 vaccines rolled out in 2020, people in the U.S. and wealthy European countries were more likely to get vaccinated if they believed doing so would benefit others.

How so? Researchers from the U.S. and Europe tested how more than 6,000 adults reacted to each of four arguments for getting vaccinated within the first six months the shots were available.

People exposed to a message emphasizing vaccination’s protective effect on the health of their country’s population were 3.8 percentage points more likely to have gotten vaccinated by July 2021 than those who weren’t.

The second most effective message said getting vaccinated would help the economy, and the third stressed protecting others.

What fell flat: A message that said: “If you were vaccinated, you could avoid getting infected with the virus.”

Even so: The study didn’t address the accuracy of the messages.

In the early days of the vaccination campaign, public health officials hoped that vaccines would prevent Covid transmission. That didn’t turn out to be the case, and uptake of subsequent boosters has been much lower than the first shots.

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Employer health plans can now discriminate against patients with kidney failure. Prevent that tragedy. 

Congress: Restore what’s right – protect dialysis patients and their families.

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