Replacing Just One Sugary Drink With Water, Tea Or Coffee Can Reduce Diabetes

If you replace one sugary beverage with plain water, or even just tea or coffee, you can bring down your risk of getting type 2 diabetes by almost 25 per cent, says new research, according to ctvnews.

Having been published Thursday in the European journal Diabetologia, the article showed that sweet drinks tend to lead to diabetes.

The stats are clear---if you increase a person's energy intake by five per cent merely through sweet beverages, you might shoot the risk of contracting type 2 diabetes by 18 per cent, says research.

Hence change just one thing about your regular drinks. Include a sugary drink---maybe a soft drink or beverage---with water, or tea or coffee without sugar. It can automatically pull down your risk of getting diabetes by 14-25 per cent.

In Britain, more than 3 million people are thought to be diabetic patients, linked to "obesity, lack of exercise and poor diet", according to theguardian.

The research studied 25,000 British men and women aged 40-79. By maintaining a food diary for seven consecutive days, scientists focused on the type, amount and frequency of portions, and also checked if sugar was added. Even after 11 years, 847 participants were found with type 2 diabetes.

Using the dietary assessment with a food diary, researchers were able to study different types of sugary drinks, sweetened milk beverages, artificially sweetened drinks, and fruit juice. After accounting for body mass index and waist girth, there was a risk of diabetes associated with consumption of both soft drinks and sweetened milk drinks.

By replacing a serving of soft drinks with water or unsweetened tea or coffee, the risk of diabetes was cut by 14 per cent. And, by substituting sweetened milk drink with water or unsweetened tea or coffee led to a further decrease in risk: 20-25 per cent.

Researchers also noted that consuming drinks with artificial sweeteners instead of sugar-sweetened drinks was not linked to a significant reduction in type 2 diabetes, when accounting for baseline obesity and total energy intake.

"The authors estimated that if study participants had reduced the energy they obtained from sweet beverages to below 10%, 5% or 2% of total daily energy, 3%, 7% or 15% respectively of new-onset diabetes cases could have been avoided," explained the study.

Dr. Nita Forouhi from the University of Cambridge, one of the lead writers of the article, explained the "good news"---the study shows that just water or unsweetened tea or coffee can not only reduce the risk of diabetes but also give some "practical suggestions for healthy alternative drinks for the prevention of diabetes."

Forouhi added that to bringing down the burden of diabetes with sweetened drinks gives "further important evidence to the recommendation from the World Health Organization to limit the intake of free sugars in our diet."