Health: Diabetes And Soda: Drawing A Connection

Want to stay trim and lower your risk of Type 2 diabetes? Try cutting out the soft drinks. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women who regularly drank sugar-sweetened soda or fruit punch gained significantly more weight and had a greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes than women who rarely indulged in high-sugar drinks. (Drinking diet soda had no significant effect.) The frequent soda sippers, who downed more than one sugary beverage a day, also tended to exercise less, smoke more, weigh more and eat more, but when researchers adjusted for such unhealthy factors, these women still showed a 40% greater risk for developing diabetes than did women who had fewer than one sugar-sweetened drink a month.