healthier choices, the study found. Replacing a sugar-sweetened drink with an artificially sweetened one was linked to an eight percent lower risk of early death and a 15 percent lower risk of death from heart-related causes
Fruit juices, with high natural sugar content but also nutrients, fell somewhere in between.
“Fruit juice is still better than the sugar-sweetened beverages,” Sun shares.
Dr. Nita Gandhi Forouhi, of the University of Cambridge in England, is the author of an accompanying editorial. She wrote that the findings point in one direction: Drinking fewer sugar-sweetened drinks and more of the healthier alternatives is best for folks with type 2 diabetes.
How sugary drinks affect your health
Forouhi notes that the analysis did not differentiate between different types of tea or the impact of adding sugar to coffee.
Yet, the choice of beverage clearly matters.
These drinks contribute to energy intake and to diet quality, which can affect obesity and longer-term health, Forouhi shares.
“Diabetes is a pretty serious issue and it does indeed cut down people’s life expectancy and, at the very least, their quality of life,” she adds. “Even if they live long, they have a life often that is complicated with heart disease and all sorts of other problems, kidney disease and sensation problems and so on, so if there is something seemingly so simple as just swap your drinks and that can really have quite a meaningful impact, I think that’s a pretty powerful message.”
RELATED: The Most Sugary Drinks Of Summer
How to minimize your sugary drink intake
Connie Diekman, a food and nutrition consultant and former president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, notes that sugar-sweetened beverages have lots of calories but little, if any, nutritional value. They don’t satisfy hunger, and it’s possible to consume a large quantity within minutes. A healthy lifestyle can be about finding balance, she says.
“As a registered dietitian, what I always say to people is, ‘OK, so if you want the hundred calories in this food that gives you nothing else, what other food are you willing to not consume?'” Diekman adds.
She suggests that people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes meet with a registered dietitian to help determine what they should eat and review their overall health, eating habits and lifestyle.
Everyone, not just people with type 2 diabetes, should look at how much of these drinks they consume, Diekman suggests.
“Take about three days, look at your food intake. How much sugar-sweetened beverage is in there? Is it one a day, two a day, three a day? And how can you begin to reduce that?” Diekman says. “Do it slowly, so that it’s comfortable and maintainable.”