A comprehensive study of European adults has found that compared with people who drink a single sugar-sweetened drink daily, those who drink water, coffee or tea instead are at 14 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The research found drinking sugar-sweetened milk products was an even more powerful driver of diabetes; compared with those who drank one such beverage daily, people who drank water, coffee or tea instead were on average 20 percent to 25 percent less likely to develop diabetes.

The British study, which tracked the consumption habits of more than 25,000 Britons over about 11 years, offered little comfort to drinkers of artificially sweetened beverages. While consumers of coffee, tea and water had a diminished risk of diabetes, the study found consumers of diet sodas to have type 2 diabetes risks on par with drinkers of sugar-sweetened beverages.

But when the authors took body mass index and waist circumference into account, they found consumption of diet beverages was not linked to higher rates of diabetes. This suggests that diet soda drinkers are already more likely to be overweight or obese, and this might account for their elevated diabetes risk.

The new research, published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, offered another surprise as well: consumption of fruit juice and sweetened tea or coffee was not associated with diabetes.

While offering some insights into different beverages’ contribution to diabetes rates, the study does not test the likely effects of changing established consumption patterns and substituting one kind of drink for another. Instead, it tracked the consumption patterns of a large population over a lengthy period of time to see who was more or less likely to develop diabetes.

Such a “prospective observational study” does not establish that sugar-sweetened sodas directly cause diabetes, or that, say, a long-standing consumer of sugary sodas can lower her diabetes risk by switching to tea.