
Diabetes rises with daily soda -- including diet soda -- consumption
A comprehensive study of European adults has found that compared with people who drink a single sugar-sweetened drink daily, those who drink water, coffee or tea instead are at 14% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
The research found that drinking sugar-sweetened milk products was an even more powerful driver of diabetes; compared with those who drank one such beverage daily, people who drank water, coffee or tea instead were on average 20% to 25% less likely to develop diabetes.
The British study, which tracked the consumption habits of more than 25,000 Britons (ages 40 to 79) over about 11 years, offered little comfort to drinkers of artificially sweetened beverages. While consumers of coffee, tea and water had a diminished risk of diabetes, the study found consumers of diet sodas to have type 2 diabetes risks on par with drinkers of sugar-sweetened beverages.
But when the authors took body mass index and waist circumference into account, they found that consumption of diet beverages was not linked to higher rates of diabetes. This suggests that diet soda drinkers are already more likely to be overweight or obese, and that this - rather than their diet soda consumption - might account for their elevated diabetes risk.
While offering some insights into different beverages' contribution to diabetes rates, the study does not test the likely effects of changing established consumption patterns and substituting one kind of drink for another. Instead, it tracked the consumption patterns of a large population over a lengthy period of time to see who was more or less like
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