Research

Hormonal

The association between high protein intake and diabetes risk is significantly modified by adiposity, being stronger in lean individuals and attenuated or non-significant in obese individuals.

If you are lean, be particularly cautious with very high protein intake, as this study links it to a higher diabetes risk in your subgroup. In obese individuals, this specific link was not observed, possibly because other factors like adiposity dominate the risk profile.

ModerateQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
In the relation between total protein and diabetes... we only found an association in lean individuals... whereas there was no relation in obese participants.
Ivonne Sluijs et al. · Diabetes Care · 2009

Why this rating

Interaction terms were borderline significant (P ~ 0.08), and the number of non-obese diabetic participants was relatively small.

Source

Dietary Intake of Total, Animal, and Vegetable Protein and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-NL Study

Ivonne Sluijs et al. · Diabetes Care · 2009

DOI 10.2337/dc09-1321

cohort · n=38094Cited 346×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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