Sweetened soft drinks, even fruity ones, tied to diabetes risk in African-American women

African-American women who regularly consumed sugary soft drinks -- including fruit drinks that might seem healthier -- were more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than women who didn’t drink them very often, according to a large national study conducted by Boston researchers.

Julie R. Palmer of Boston University and colleagues at BU’s School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health followed about 59,000 women taking part in the Black Women’s Health Study for 10 years. Black women in the United States are twice as likely to have type 2 diabetes as white women. The researchers hoped to understand the potential role of sweetened beverages and weight gain in the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Writing in tomorrow’s Archives of Internal Medicine, they report that women who drank two or more sugary soft drinks a day had a 24 percent higher incidence of type 2 diabetes than women who drank less than one soft drink a month. For women who drank at least two sweetened fruit drinks daily, which did not include orange or grapefruit juice, the rate was 31 percent higher than for those who had no more than one per month.

The women who drank sweetened fruit drinks tended to be more physically active and eat a healthier diet than the women who favored sweetened soft drinks, perhaps a sign that they thought the drinks were a good choice, too. But the study's results suggest they were not.

"Consumption of fruit drinks conveyed as high an increase in [diabetes] risk as did consumption of soft drinks," the authors write. "The public should be made aware that these drinks are not a healthy alternative to soft drinks with regard to risk of type 2 diabetes."