Eating yogurt regularly appears to be associated with a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Eating even one serving of yogurt a day was enough to reduce the risk. However, other types of dairy products were not linked to any reduction in risk of developing type-2 diabetes. It also did not matter whether the dairy products were low-fat or high-fat.
It appears that for each serving of yogurt consumed per day the risk of developing type-2 diabetes is reduced by18%.
This finding comes from a study of data collected by several very large long-term studies of people and their diet and health habits. These including the Nurses' Health Study, the Nurses' Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. These studies are prospective, which means that they enrolled participants and then followed up with them regularly for as long as 30 years. The participants were asked about their dietary habits every 2 years, including questions about how many servings and what types of dairy food they ate. These studies are still continuing, which means that data is continuing to be collected on the same people.
Of the more than 194,000 people enrolled in the three studies, there were 15,156 people who developed type-2 diabetes who did not have it at the start. The data was adjusted for factors such as body weight, age, smoking, and high blood pressure.
This research was done because it has been suggested that eating dairy products might reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Dairy products contain magnesium, calcium, vitamin D, and certain fatty acids, which are thought to offer a protective effect against type-2 diabetes. Type-2 diabetes was formerly called adult-onset diabetes.
There are about 26 million people in the United States with type-2 diabetes and the incidence of the disease is increasing. Untreated or poorly treated diabetes can lead to cardiovascular disease, blindness, and kidney failure.
The researchers who conducted the study are from Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The study was published on-line at BMC Medicine.
