People who ate the most of a little-known sugar found in beef and lamb had a 63% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who ate the least, according to preliminary findings presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Milan. The headline number comes with a major limitation.
When researchers also accounted for how much red meat people ate, the link between the sugar and diabetes weakened and was no longer statistically significant. That means the study cannot say whether the sugar itself, called Neu5Gc, raises risk or whether something else in red meat is responsible.
