Any relation between juice and diabetes?

According to an article in the recent edition of Good Housekeeping magazine, a recent study was conducted that concluded that women who drink apple juice or orange juice in specified quantities have various increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.  They specified that it is the insulin spike caused by drinking juice that increases the risk.  My question – is this hypothesis entirely rubbish or is there any truth to the study?

Obviously, I am obviously no scientist but I believe I can make some educated analysis of their assertions.  First, I do not believe there is any question that beverages with high concentrates of sugar, natural or added, are going to cause insulin spikes.  However, that includes plenty of beverages not just juice.  What about all the soda and other beverages containing high fructose corn syrup?  Last time I checked, they have the same cause and effect WITHOUT any nutritional value.

Second, there was always what is believed to be the “fallacy” that eating sugar causes diabetes.  Over recent years, with all the research available, it seems to be that might not be such a fallacy if you follow the steps through. 

People have increased their intake of carbohydrates for a variety of reasons including taste, desire, ease of preparation, the assertion that low fat is healthy, etc.  If you believe what we were taught in school, we were put on this planet to be hunters and gathers thus we were bred to eat meat and whatever we could pick and eat right, then and there since there was no real storage capability.  The body was created to survive through famine situations (etc.) and therefore, we do not need such high volumes of food, much less carbohydrates.  Thus, the body did not always require high volumes of insulin production and release. 

These historical conditions hardly match up to what we expect of our bodies today.  For some reason, we think we need to eat a lot of food and our tastes buds prefer sweet food rather than rabbit or chicken or ….  On top of that, we no longer have to perform physical work for our daily fare or (in most cases) worry about famine.  We no longer have to slap clothes upside rocks or perform other very physically laborious tasks.  Thus, we spit out extra insulin and store food we do not need to eat in the first place.

So, is the “fallacy” that eating sugar causes (Type 2) diabetes really a fallacy?  I am not so sure it is.   However, does juice really cause the problem?  That I do not believe.  Did they bother to try the same test using soda or fruit “drinks” (which have little to no actual juice) at the same volume, duration and intervals?  I do not think so based on the information in the article.  However, there was not much detailed information about the actual study.  The concept of high volumes of sugar ingestion produce high volumes of insulin production and release, which then creates insulin resistance /decreased insulin production and Type 2 diabetes, is one worth mulling over, however.

Doris J. Dickson