4 key facts that link soft drinks and diabetes

Most everyone enjoys a refreshing soda on a hot day, but these drinks have zero nutritional value and can even contribute to diabetes. These 4 tips will give you the facts about soft drinks and help you make healthier decisions.

Your averages soft drink is full of sugar!

• A typical 355-millilitre can has between 40 and 50 grams, usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup which is chemically similar to table sugar.
• Numerous studies have proven the connection between soft drinks, sugar and diabetes.

If you’re wondering what the facts and figures are connected to diabetes, you’ll be interested in a study that concluded:

• Women who drank one or more sugar-sweetened beverages per day increased their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 83 per cent.
•  Drinking soft drinks, fruit drinks and other sweetened beverages regularly seemed to increase the threat of diabetes independent of any influence on body weight.

No surprise here. Soft drinks cause weight gain. And guess what? Being overweight increases the risk of diabetes.

There are countless studies connecting sugar-laden drinks and an increase in blood sugar to your risk of developing diabetes.

• Studies show that downing sugary soft drinks causes a steep increase in blood sugar.
• This triggers an increase in insulin, the hormone responsible for carrying blood sugar into cells.
• Over time, this forces your body to churn out a lot of insulin, which makes cells less sensitive to the hormone. causing iInsulin resistance, which is a problem at the core of type 2 diabetes.

There are even further interesting insights into blood sugar levels and diabetes that relate to a particular kind of sugar: high-fructose corn syrup and how it may contribute to insulin resistance.

• Emerging theory suggests it has much less of an impact on blood sugar than glucose, the other component of table sugar.
• As a result the liver, which metabolizes a portion of the insulin in a person's bloodstream, suffers the most.

Too much sugar is bad for your health but we don't always think about where it appears in our food and drink.

• Soft drinks contain large quantities of sugar and studies have connected their regular consumption with the development of diabetes.

Simply knowing the facts allows you to make better choices about what you put into your body, which could help prevent the onset of this serious disease.