Just two diet sodas can double type 2 diabetes risk

Study finds two diet sodas can double your risk of type 2 diabetes

It’s about time we call soda what it really is — diabetes in a bottle.

And I’m not just talking about the kind with high fructose corn syrup in it, either.

A new study is proving (again) that soda — including the diet kind — can put you on the fast-track to a lifetime of diabetes.

That’s right — the same artificially-sweetened drinks that groups like the American Diabetes Association recommend as being a safe alternative for diabetics.

And you don’t have to be guzzling them all day to be at risk.

No safe amount

The diet soda bubble has once again been burst.

As far as diabetes is concerned, it doesn’t matter if you’re drinking a Diet Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper or the full-calorie, HFCS version, you’re still upping your risk big-time.

Researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that drinking just two small (six-to-seven-ounce) sodas a day could more than double your chances of developing type 2 diabetes.

And if you have five or more you’re upping the risk tenfold! The researchers boiled it down to a 20 percent increase for each soda you down.

As I said, the same danger was found in both diet and regular versions.

The study, published in The European Journal of Endocrinology, also found that the more soda you drink the greater your risk of getting Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults, or LADA.

That’s a disorder that combines the health dangers of both type 2 and type 1, or juvenile diabetes.

Those findings led the researchers, who crunched data on close to 3,000 people, to say that even they were surprised at how big a diabetes risk they found.

But as an eAlert reader, you shouldn’t be.

Last year I told you about research published in the British Medical Journal that discovered simply drinking one soda a day can up your risk of type 2 diabetes by 20 percent. And here’s the kicker — it didn’t matter if you wore a size zero or shopped in the plus department, your risk is the same.

That study also found that diet drinks are even worse. They can up your risk by a whopping 25 percent — no matter what you weigh!

And just this past summer Canadian researchers took a look at thousands of adults, comparing those who regularly consumed artificial sweeteners and ones who didn’t.

Those who used the fakes, like aspartame, did much worse on a standard glucose tolerance test.

The scientists believe that may be because chemicals like aspartame, even in low doses, cause our microbes to start making a compound that is easily converted by the body into glucose.

Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt at this point that soda is deadly. And diet sodas are just as bad, if not worse, for our health.

But if all that wasn’t enough to get you to kick a soda habit, be it large or small, maybe this will.

Two years ago I told you how drinking soda can have the same effect on your body as smoking.

Researchers found that the more soda you drink, the shorter your telomeres. Those are the protective “caps” at the end of our chromosomes in all of our cells.

Experts now believe that things that shorten our telomeres are the same ones that shorten our life. Things such as exposure to certain chemicals, smoking, not getting enough exercise…and drinking soda.

The study found that drinking 20 ounces a day can damage your telomeres the same as if you smoke. But even less than one bottle was enough to start the damage going.

The bottom line is that if you think you’re protecting yourself from the ravages of soda by only drinking the “diet” kind, your body simply isn’t buying it.

Sources:
“Diet drinks double the risk of type 2 diabetes” Sylvia Booth Hubbard, October 21, 2016, Newsmax, newsmax.com