Artificially Sweetened Beverages Lead to Diabetes

Several recent studies have begun to show that the common sense replacement of sugar sweetened beverages with artificially sweetened beverages actually makes little sense at all. It’s not that they’ve discovered that sugar sweetened drinks are good for you: they’re not. But artificially sweetened ones are little, if any, better. Recent studies have linked artificially sweetened drinks to glucose intolerance, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and even weight loss.

And now, a new study makes the research for artificially sweetened drinks even more bitter to swallow. . . .

This massive meta-analysis of seventeen studies included 38,253 people. It found that drinking just one serving a day of a sugar sweetened drink is associated with an 18% increase in the risk of type 2 diabetes. Drinking just one artificially sweetened beverage a day is linked with a whopping 25% increase in the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Some past studies have suffered from the weakness that they leave open the question of whether people who drink artificially sweetened drinks are at higher risk of conditions like diabetes because drinkers of artificially sweetened diet drinks are more likely to be overweight–hence the diet drink–and it is really the weight problem that is increasing the risk of disease.

The current meta-analysis controlled for that question. When the researchers took weight into account, the risk of type 2 diabetes increased by 13% in the sugar sweetened drink population. And–here’s the important part–drinking one artificially sweetened drink a day still increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 8% in the artificially sweetened population. That suggests that, independent of weight, artificially sweetened drinks actually significantly increase the risk of diabetes.

BMJ 2015;351:h3576