According to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a low-fat diet with increased fruit, vegetable, and grain intake reduces the risk of death after breast cancer.

The trial followed 48,835 postmenopausal women without breast cancer for 8.5 years. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two diets, a low-fat diet and a standard diet. The dietary goal for the low-fat group was to achieve less than 20% of total calories from fat and to increase intake of fruits and vegetables to five servings a day, and grains to six servings a day. The remaining participants in the control group ate their usual diet, which resembled the standard American diet (SAD).

According to the US Dietary Guidelines, the standard American diet has too much fat and too few fruits and vegetables. Most fat is consumed as oils in packaged foods such as salad dressing, mayonnaise, prepared vegetables, corn and potato chips, and as saturated fat from meat, cheese, and other dairy products.

After 8.5 years, there were fewer deaths in the low-fat group, but the difference was not statistically significant. During the 16-year follow-up period, the number of deaths after breast cancer was significantly reduced in the group following the low-fat diet.

The authors concluded that a low-fat high-fruit-vegetable-grain eating pattern may lower the incidence of death after breast cancer.

Research presented at this year’s European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Lisbon, Portugal suggested that artificial sweeteners may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by changing the body’s response to glucose.

Twenty-seven healthy individuals were given a placebo or two noncaloric artificial sweeteners, sucralose and acesulfame-K, in an amount equivalent to drinking four 12-ounce cans of a diet beverage. After two weeks, the participants were tested for rates of glucose (sugar) absorption, insulin levels, and gut hormones levels that control food intake.

This small study determined that it took two weeks of consuming an equivalent of four cans of diet beverage to increase the rate sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream and increase the body’s response to sugar. The participants had an increase in blood sugar, as opposed to a decrease in blood sugar as would be expected with the consumption of a beverage containing no sugar.

Despite the growing evidence that nonnutritive sweeteners may not be healthy substitutes for sugar-sweetened beverages,  popular health websites, such as the Mayo Clinic, suggest that individuals with diabetes use nonnutritive sweeteners. Sweeteners  in their list include saccharin (Sweet'N Low), aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), acesulfame potassium (Sunett), sucralose, (Splenda) and stevia (Pure Via, Truvia).

The author of the Mayo Clinic page on nonnutritive sweeteners mentions that recent studies have cast doubt on recommending these sweeteners, and the benefits of making these substitutions are not clear.

* Pepsi no longer uses sucralose in their diet soda.