A soda a day might just kill your pancrease...

... and the risk goes up with each ounce.  Yikes!

Trending on Bing today was a multinational study done on the association of daily soda indulgences and diabetes. 

The study was done by a large group of researchers led by D. Romaguera of the Imperial College London, and was published April 24, 2013 in the journal Diabetologia.  You can download a .zip file of the abstract and graphics from the Diabetologia site.

An "association" it not as powerful a scientific word as "cause".  So you can't come out and say that soda causes diabetes based on this study alone. 

But you can build a pretty strong case that it's a good bet.  To quote from the study:

The observed association between sugar-sweetened soft drinks and diabetes in the present analysis is of similar magnitude as the association reported in a meta-analysis of eight prospective studies, which was based on 15,043 diabetes cases mostly from the USA (except for one study from Finland and one from Singapore): every increment of one serving of 12 oz of sugar-sweetened beverages/day yielded an RR of 1.25 (95% CI 1.10, 1.42) in the dose–response meta-analysis [6], very similar to the HR of 1.22 (95% CI 1.09, 1.38) in the present study.

(download a .zip file of the study from the Diabetologia website.)
 

Basically, it came to the same conclusion as 8 other big studies (6 or which were done in the good ol' USA) with very little statistical differences in the results.  This is HUGE, because the study was NOT done in the USA, and still showed the same results.  You can't blame this association on the American diet.  I'll bet most of the folks in this European study, the Finnish study, and the Singapore study don't eat the typical American diet - outside of their soda habit, that is.

What is the take-away for the average Jane?  Soda does NOT do a body good. 

Damn!  But they taste so good!

Well, if you just can't go cold turkey, switch to juice.

The study also included analysis of fake-sugar sodas and juices/nectars.  It reports mixed results with both.  It also points out that the data gathering did not differentiate between juices/nectars that did and did not have added sugar.  Even so, that association between juices/nectars and diabetes was small, which the association between sugar/corn-syrup sweetened soda was big.