health

Sugary drinks can raise diabetes risk by 22%

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I doubt it's the 1 can of soda that is causing diabetes. People who drink soda are also less likely to be health conscious, to eat poorly, to do little exercise if at all etc. There are too many confounding factors. For example you can't say a cigarette lighter causes lung cancer, as most smokers carry cigarette lighters.

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"sugar-laced soda"

What about sugar-laced coffee, milk/lemon tea, pies, cakes... omg...

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Carcharodon, it certainly would be a concern if this study only examined the statistical relationship between sugary soft drink consumption and diabetes. Part of the problem is the simplistic way these kinds of results are reported; it makes it sound like they just looked at one factor. However, it is unlikely that the researchers have just "singled out one item". You can see that they questioned people "about their diet, including how many sugary and artificially sweetened soft drinks and juices they drank each day." I have seen another study by Dora Romaguera in which she and her team looked at a whole range of dietary intakes and other health factors, and then used statistical analysis to find the ones that were most strongly related to each other. So, not having read this most recent study, I would say that they probably looked at a lot of types of food consumed, and found a strong correlation between sugary soft drink consumption and diabetes, which was stronger than the relationship between diabetes and the consumption of other kinds of foods. It is interesting that fruit juice consumption was not linked to diabetes incidence, but then, fruit does have a different kind of sugar in it. So we would have to read the study itself to find out whether they just "singled out" and studied only sugary soft drink consumption, but if they did, I would be very surprised.

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I drink the zero calorie stuff, which is strangely scarce in Japan. In Australia (where I holiday) there are a variety of zero (or one) calorie drinks including ginger beer, but here there is coke/pepsi and lemonade, and little else in the stores near me. Oh, and of course there are all the varieties of green and brown tea.

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Good point, Carcarodon. The scare over artificially sweetened drinks is even a bigger red herring. Many of the drinkers are people who have had to switch away from sugar/corn syrup to aspartame for health or dietary reasons, often on orders from doctors. So they're already unhealthy before their aspartame consumption and by the time they're surveyed.

Indeed, the sugar industry is evil and fosters destructive addiction among the population, especially children, for the sake of profit. Even food products with natural sweetness containing fruit, for example, are laden with added sugar or corn syrup. So you can't escape it. No surprise that historically the sugar industry was built on slavery.

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A tad disingenuous It's not like a person who drinks one can a day is eating healthy whole foods and just having one sneaky can of soda - It's not their only nutritional indiscretion.

They eating sugar filled breads and snacks, and other processed high carbohydrate foods, pasta and breads and cakes, cookies, potato chips etc etc.

it's the whole package, you cant single out one item, you have to look at the total.

Many findings about meat consumption also suffer from similar read herrings. It's not necessarily the item being studied, it's all the other crap that people consume.

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