If you’ve been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, your doctor’s told you that diet plays a major role in reducing your blood sugar levels and body weight.

Changing from a diet rich in animal fats, sugar and “simple carbohydrates” to “complex carbohydrates” like fruits, vegetables and whole grains, takes tremendous willpower and persistence. In fact, most doctors will recommend a gradual change to avoid binge dieting.

As part of a gradual change towards healthy eating and drinking habits, the single, most important shift you can make is eliminating soda from your diet.

Many diabetics we talk with have an unhealthy regimen of drinking 8, 10, even 12 cans of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper or other carbonated beverage, every day. These aren’t the diet version sodas, but fully-loaded pop that carries a double threat for diabetics.

First, non-diet versions of these beverages are high in calories. Most people don’t think of soda as being fattening, but it is loaded with 150-200 empty calories per serving that are the single greatest cause of overweight or obesity.

Second, these high calorie beverages aren’t sweetened with sugar (as they once were), but with a low cost sugar substitute called high fructose corn syrup. This nasty ingredient, introduced by beverage manufacturers over 30 years ago, has been fingered by medical experts as dangerous – it sucks the chromium right out of your system.

This is a critical problem because our bodies need chromium to help regulate normal, healthy blood sugar levels.

So that Coke, Pepsi or Mountain Dew your downing not only causes your waistline to seriously swell and your weight to balloon, it’s also throwing your blood sugar out of whack!

A double diabetic whammy in a can!

We talk with a lot of Type 2 diabetics and pre-diabetics every day. And one of the first things we recommend is that if they have a daily soda fix, to eliminate this as soon as possible from their diet.