Having too much sugar in your diet is a huge risk factor in developing Type 2 diabetes. And one of the worst contributors to the problem is thought to be fizzy drinks. Fizzy drinks are often loaded with sugar, but they can be consumed very quickly without even noticing the torrent of sugar that you are pumping into your body. This has led to a large number of people to choose ‘diet’ versions of the drinks instead.
Diet fizzy drinks use artificial, sugar-free sweeteners to make the drink taste sweet. As such they seem like a much better option if you want to avoid developing diabetes. Unfortunately, however, while this might seem like sensible advice on the surface, new research appears to have turned this idea on its head.
The study, from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, confirmed that artificially sweetened drinks have been linked to a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes for women than fizzy drinks sweetened with ordinary sugar.
Over 66,000 female French volunteers were evaluated on their dietary habits and their health was then monitored over 14 years from 1993 to 2007. The researchers compared women who drank both artificially and sugar sweetened fizzy drinks, and unsweetened fruit juices. Women who drank either type of the fizzy drinks were more likely than juice-drinkers to develop diabetes.
But drinkers of diet fizzy drinks were found to have an even higher likelihood of developing it than women who drank standard fizzy drinks. It was noted by the researchers than, women drinking the diet drinks on average consumed more of the drinks than women drinking the sugar versions. It is though that this could be part of the reason why it made more likely for diabetes to develop.
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