‘Forget colas, sweet fruit drinks lead to diabetes too’

Chicago: Sweetened fruit drinks are often marketed as a healthier alternative to non-diet soft drinks but are just as likely to cause weight gain and increase the risk of diabetes, researchers said.
    "The public should be made aware that these drinks are not a healthy alternative to soft drinks with regard to risk of type 2 diabetes," Julie Palmer and colleagues at Boston University wrote in their report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, is closely linked to obesity and has become more common worldwide.
    The findings came from a look at nearly 44,000 black women in the United States who were checked from 1995 through 2005.
    Those who said they drank two or more non-diet soft drinks a day had a 24% increased risk for developing type 2 diabetes than those in the study who drank fewer than one regular soft drink per month, the research team said.
    Women who drank two or more sweetened fruit drinks per day had a 31% increased risk compared to those who drank fewer than one such fruit drink a month. Diet soft drinks, grapefruit juice and orange juice were not linked to a higher diabetes risk, the researchers said.
    While pure orange and grapefruit juices also contain sugars naturally, they may have a different metabolic effect or may be more likely to be consumed as part of a meal, the investigators said.
    Soft drinks and sweetened juices are often consumed between meals and may lead to snacking, they said.
    An earlier study involving thousands of white women also linked diabetes to both soft drinks and sweetened juices, the report said. Another study in the same journal found that eating fruits and vegetables seems to ward off type 2 diabetes, perhaps by preventing obesity or providing protective nutrients, including antioxidants. REUTERS
A few extra steps help control diabetes:
Walking a bit more each day can help people control their Type 2 diabetes but obese people trying to keep weight off may need to exercise harder than they had thought, according to a studiy published on Monday. Simply walking 45 minutes more each day helped people with diabetes use blood sugar better, Michael Trenell of Britain's Newcastle University and colleagues wrote in the journal Diabetes Care. REUTERS