Give up the 'sugar water'

8 ways to prevent diabetes

Millions of Canadians are living with diabetes and prediabetes. There are steps and lifestyle changes you can take to ward off the disease

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5. Give up the 'sugar water'

Start quenching your thirst with water, soda water (with a squeeze of lemon or lime), unsweetened tea or skim milk instead of soft drinks, fruit juice drinks, coffee or sweetened iced-tea drinks.

A single daily serving of soft drink raised the risk of metabolic syndrome (described above) by a staggering 44 percent in a headline-grabbing study from Boston University School of Medicine in the US. Experts have many theories as to why this is. It could simply be all those extra kilojoules in soft drinks and other sugary drinks or in the high-fat, high-kilojoule foods we tend to pair them with (hot chips and pizza). Experts are also finding that drinking even a single soft drink a day is associated with being overweight, perhaps because the kilojoules in drinks don't register in our brains, so we don't compensate for them by eating less food.

Another possible culprit is high-fructose corn syrup. It's essentially sugar in liquid form, except that for technical chemical reasons, some experts believe it's more likely to lead to insulin resistance.

For a healthier thirst quencher, drop several tea bags (black, green or herbal) into a jug filled with water and refrigerate overnight before drinking. And don't rule out a glass of skim milk. The calcium, vitamin D and other minerals in dairy foods may be the reason that getting at least one serve of low-fat or skim milk (or yogurt or cheese) a day lowered metabolic syndrome risk by up to 62 per cent in one particular UK study.