Even if you eat a lot of fructose—like from fruit, soda, or sweets—your body’s ability to use insulin properly or the amount of fat in your liver doesn’t seem to change just because of that fructose, as long as you’re eating the same total calories and living a similar lifestyle.

If you have recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and you double how much sugary soda you drink, your body becomes about 2.6% less able to use insulin properly and you’re about 16–17% more likely to get fat in your liver—even if you’re not eating more calories overall.

Even if you drink fruit juice with lots of fructose, it doesn’t seem to make your body less sensitive to insulin or worsen fatty liver—once you account for how much you eat overall and how active you are.

If you’ve just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and you eat twice as much fruit as before, you might be 13% less likely to get a fatty liver—even if you’re eating the same total amount of calories.

If you’ve just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, drinking sugary sodas might make your liver less responsive to insulin—but if you’re active and move around more, that bad effect isn’t as strong.

Eating too much fructose over a long time can mess up how your liver responds to insulin, and that comes before your whole body becomes resistant to insulin—making your heart more at risk for disease.