Fruit may lower diabetes risk while juice may raise it

Conclusion This study found that eating more of some whole fruits was associated with a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but eating other fruits was not. It also found that drinking more fruit juice was associated with an increase in risk. The study has a range of strengths, including: its large size (almost 190,000 participants) long follow-up (more than 3,000,000 years in total across all participants) collecting data prospectively assessing diet at a number of time points, not just once taking into account a range of potential confounders There are also some limitations, including that people had to report their own diet and diagnoses, and may not always have done so accurately. This may be particularly a problem for foods that are not eaten regularly. For example, the correlation between food diaries and the questionnaire for strawberry intake in men was not very good. In their juice analyses the researchers did not look at the impact of the type of juice people drank, for example, whether this was freshly squeezed or from concentrate, or sweetened or not. Different types of juice could have differing effects. Although the researchers tried to remove the effect of a large range of potential confounders they may still have an effect. This makes it hard to determine the exact effect of one small component of diet, such as an individual kind of fruit. On average (median) people ate between zero and one serving a week of the individual f...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Diabetes Food/diet Source Type: news