Drinking just one fizzy drink a day can increase your diabetes risk
Drinking one sugary drink a day can increase your risk of Type 2 diabetes, according to new research.
The largest study of its kind to find the link between soft-drink consumption and Type 2 diabetes has found that not only drinking sweetened beverages will cause weight gain, which is associated with a higher rate of diabetes, but also increase the risk of the condition independently.
The study found that it increases the risk by 22 per cent.
The research was conducted by Dr Dora Romaguera, Dr Petra Wark and Dr Teresa Norat, Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues and comes from data in the InterAct consortium.
Almost one in 20 adults in the UK has diabetes, of which 2.6 million are diagnosed and 500,000 are undiagnosed. Rates are rising in this country and around the world, driven by Western lifestyles, and the number of cases is expected to exceed 4 million in the UK by 2025.
Dr Dora Romaguera says that the link between sugar-sweetened soft drinks and type 2 diabetes is not new. However, she says most of the previous studies were "conducted in small samples and mostly in samples from North America".
She says: "This is the strongest evidence we have to date for the association between these types of drinks and diabetes incidence. Also, this is one of the first European studies to show this association."
Dr Romaguera continued: "There was an association in normal weight individuals, overweight and the obese. Even in normal weight individuals, those who drank a glass of soft drink a day were more likely to develop diabetes."
Diet drinks, with artificial sweeteners, did not appear to increase the risk once account was taken of individuals' weight and calorie intake.