Research

Mixed

Artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs) are associated with a 25% increased risk of type 2 diabetes before adjustment for adiposity, which attenuates to 8% after adjustment, but likely involve bias and are not healthy alternatives.

Switching from sugar-sweetened to artificially sweetened beverages may not reduce your diabetes risk as much as expected, and the association may be influenced by bias. Neither is a clearly healthy option for diabetes prevention.

ModerateQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
for artificially sweetened beverages, 25% (18% to 33%, I2=70%) and 8% (2% to 15%, I2=64%)... Potential sources of heterogeneity or bias were not evident for sugar sweetened beverages. For artificially sweetened beverages, publication bias and residual confounding were indicated.
Fumiaki Imamura et al. · BMJ · 2015

Why this rating

Meta-analysis of prospective cohorts, but significant publication bias and residual confounding limit certainty.

Source

Consumption of sugar sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened beverages, and fruit juice and incidence of type 2 diabetes: systematic review, meta-analysis, and estimation of population attributable fraction

Fumiaki Imamura et al. · BMJ · 2015

DOI 10.1136/bmj.h3576

Meta-analysis · 17 studiesCited 981×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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