Lower Risk of Diabetes – Avoid Doctor’s Advice



Drink 8 glasses of water per day. This has become a near mantra when it comes to a heathier lifestyle.  Doctors tell you it will help prevent diabetes.

It helps with weight loss (not true). It helps to detoxify (not true). It keeps you from eating as much at a meal (not true). But at least it won’t harm you, right?

Wrong.

I have previously gone over the reasons why drinking water may actually be harmful to your health. The principle reason is that, when many of us choose to drink water, it is bottled in a plastic water bottle containing Bisphenol A (BPA). I would also consider that, with every ounce of water drunk, this is one less ounce of tea that can protect you in a multitude of ways.

You see, tea (unsweetened) has been shown in hundreds and hundreds of studies to protect us from a vast array of chronic diseases. If done right, most people find tea very satisfying. My 6 year old son now orders this on a regular basis when we go out to eat and this is our primary drink around the house.

Contrast this with water, which has no evidence that I have come across that suggests it lowers the risk of chronic disease. Now I’m not saying you should go hiking in AZ at noon in August and not bring some water. But look around you. Odds are that half the people you see are lugging along a 12 oz bottled water that they keep within arm’s reach as if they were going to shrivel up into a prune at any given second.

This particular study delivers some very interesting results. The “standard” recommendations suggest that we should replace sugar sweetened beverages (SSB) and fruit juices with non-caloric drinks such as water (do NOT consider non-caloric drinks containing artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Nutrisweet to do anything but harm our progression to diabetes) to lower our risk of diabetes.

Because of this, researchers looked at what effects drinking water vs SSB would have on diabetes risk. Researchers found that replacement of a serving SSBs and fruit juices per day by a cup of plain water per day with 8% lower risk of diabetes.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, at least it does until you find out what the rest of the data demonstrated. Plain-water intake at ≥6 cups/d increased diabetes risk by 6%.

Yes–increased.

What does this mean? It means that SSB and fruit juices are not good for us. We should NEVER drink our calories (which includes milk, by the way) because it will always increase our risk for diabetes.

However, replacing SSB with water may help, but it is not the best option because water itself may actually increase the risk of diabetes, just not as much as SSB. Which of course leaves drinking more tea.

So what is your favorite type of tea?

James Bogash

For more than a decade, Dr. Bogash has stayed current with the medical literature as it relates to physiology, disease prevention and disease management. He uses his knowledge to educate patients, the community and cyberspace on the best way to avoid and / or manage chronic diseases using lifestyle and targeted supplementation.







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4 thoughts on “Lower Risk of Diabetes – Avoid Doctor’s Advice

  1. I mentioned BPA in the post. A large portion of people get their daily water intake via BPA laden plastic water bottles. BPA has been linked to diabetes.

  2. Hi,

    Given that I have NO risk factors including genetic lifestyle, exercise, I don’t eat meat etc etc. And yet I ended up with diabetes—-It occurred following a course of prednisone.

    I really think the whole diabetes thing is being looked at wrong. I believe it is a result of food that has been modified to be resistant to weed and insect poisons combined with other pollutants in the environment.

    I believe this combination causes a generalized inflammatory reaction in the body exacerbated in my case by a negative sensitivity to steroids.

    If it were just obesity and metabolic syndrome then everyone who was obese or had metabolic syndrome would by extension become diabetic. We know this does not happen.

    I do know that by drinking willow bark tea I can alter to some degree the rise in glucose I experience. I do not like to do this too often because salacylites have issues of their own.

    I do think it would be sensible to utilize some of the existing islet cells that are still functional to grow more. By returning my own cells to my body there is no worry about rejection and things may straighten out.

    I figure it is worth a try. Sadly the general thought from those who could do what I propose is that I am lying and all people with type 2 diabetes are fat and lazy.

    any thoughts?

  3. Brenda,

    Developing diabetes is not about a single aspect of lifestyle, but most likely the sum total of all that we do to ourselves. The use of steroids greatly increases the risk of diabetes (causes muscle to break down to increase glucose in the bloodstream. I completely agree that GMO foods play a role in the chronic disease rates we are seeing. As far as some type of autologous beta cell replacement, in most people the beta cells are still able to work ok–it’s the rest of the body that needs to be fixed!

    Dr. Bogash

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