"diabetes" news and stories

For years, people have thought that diet soda was the way to go if you wanted to cut down on the sugar and calories that come with regular soda. Apparently, they are now finding that it might not be such a safe choice after all. Researchers have now determined that drinking one soda a day, whether it's diet or regular, is associated with a much higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.

They've associated regular, sugar-sweetened soda, with those health concerns for years, but this is the first study that finds that diet soda is also an indicator of future health issues. They don't think that it is the ingredients in the diet soda that lead to health problems, but that drinking soda (of any variety) is an indicator of other questionable eating patterns. Which just confirms what we've all known for years. You can not redeem a quarter pounder with cheese and large fries with the addition of a diet soda.

A team of Mexican bakers made a massive, sweet gesture toward madres and abuelitas across that country last Thursday. But the only thing sweet about the 2.2 metric ton celebration of Mother's Day is the fact that it was a cake. The gigantic dessert was made entirely with zero-calorie sweetener rather than sugar.

The heart-shaped cake was 16-feet wide and fed about 150 mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. And just how much artificial sweetener does it take to make an enormous blue-and-yellow cake? A tad over 200 pounds. Of course you'll also need 23 bakers, 881 pounds of eggs, 639 pounds of whipping cream and a really big oven, among other things. The folks behind the supersized sugar-free cake want to promote artificial sweeteners in Mexico, where obesity is increasingly widespread and some 7 million people suffer from diabetes.

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Have you ever heard of soy yogurt? Until I ran across this article I hadn't. I like yogurt a lot, especially when it's a premium product like goat, sheep, or water buffalo yogurt. I even make it myself at home quite often in my yogurt maker. But soy yogurt? I will have to look for it at the market and see if I can find it. Well, soy yogurt may help control type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. It seems that enzymes in the yogurt help regulate blood sugar levels. This could be good news to the 15 million Americans and 150 million people around the world with type 2 diabetes. This discovery was accidental, like many in research. The research team bought a whole bunch of different types of yogurt with various fruit, because they were actually testing which fruit had the best levels of these enzymes. one type they bought was soy yogurt and they found out it had even higher levels of the enzyme than the regular fruit yogurts. Have any of you tried soy yogurt? Is it any good? How does it compare with other types of yogurt?

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Operating purely from a health perspective, Epicurious set out to taste some sugar-free chocolates to see if there was one on the market that didn't "taste like chalk." In this case, they were taste testing the treats with a Halloween loving but candy-deprived diabetic, so the test was not conducted from a weight-loss or low-carb mindset . This is a solid indication that the tasters really were putting taste first, and not the nutrition label. The chocolates were grouped by brand:

• Hershey's - Winner: Sugar Free York Peppermint Patties, Loser: No Sugar Hershey bars ("truly awful")
• Guylian - Winner: Dark chocolate bar, Loser: Hazelnut bar (unless you're a big hazelnut fan)
• Asher Chocolates - Winner: Espresso truffles and vanilla caramels, Loser: Peppermint patties (not minty enough)
• Godiva - Winner: Milk and dark assortment, dark chocolate candy bars, Loser: None.

In general, the tasters felt that you got what you paid for when it came to sugar-free chocolates. The Godiva chocolates were the best of the bunch and were remarkably similar to "real" chcolates. Darker chocolates, which have less sugar even in regular bars, will transition more smoothly than milk chocolates. Combining the chocolates with other strong flavors, like hazelnut, coconut or mint, can cover up any minor flaws in the chocolate and will make even a poor-quality no-sugar chocolate acceptable most of the time.

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A Finnish study that was conducted several years ago linked a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes with increased coffee consumption. It showed that people who drank 3-4 cups of cups a day had a 30% lower risk, while those women who drank 10 cups had a 79% reduction in risk. This study was reported in 2004, and the results of the study were similar to the conclusions of a recently-published study from researchers at UC San Diego that has been going on for the past 8 years.

The UCSD study said that their testing showed that current or past drinkers of caffeinated coffee had a 60% diabetes risk reduction, while those who never drank coffee did not. Apparently, not enough of the participants were decaf-only drinkers, so no conclusions could be made about them. The scientists do not think it is the caffeine that plays the crucial role in the risk-lowering, but that it is due to other compounds in the coffee.

The important thing to note from this study, according to the researchers, is that "people with diabetes and those at risk for developing diabetes have enough to worry about" and that coffee isn't one of those things.

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