Drinking sugar ‘more problematic’ than eating it: Soda, fruit juice linked to high diabetes risk

Sugar from beverages such as soda and fruit juice appears to be much more harmful to a person’s long-term health than sugar from food, according to a new meta-analysis published in Advances in Nutrition.[1] In fact, while soft drinks and fruit juices elevate a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes, that is not the case for dietary sugars consumed as part of nutrient-dense foods.

The study’s authors believe their research to be the largest meta-analysis of its kind. They emphasized that these findings may change the way people think about the relationship between sugar and type 2 diabetes. 

“This is the first study to draw clear dose-response relationships between different sugar sources and type 2 diabetes risk,” lead author Karen Della Corte, a nutritional science professor at Brigham Young University, said in a statement. “It highlights why drinking your sugar—whether from soda or juice—is more problematic for health than eating it.”

Della Corte et al. examined data from more than 800,000 adults who had originally participated in one of 29 different studies. After making corrections for BMI and other lifestyle factors, the group found that each sugar-sweetened beverage serving appeared to increase a person’s relative risk of developing type 2 diabetes by approximately 25%. Each serving of fruit juice, meanwhile, increased the relative risk by approximately 5%.