Is Drinking Diet Soda Really Bad for Your Health?
Is diet soda bad for you? Diet soda has no sugar, calories, fat, or carbohydrates, and it feels all cold and bubbly going down your throat. What’s not to like on the surface? Unfortunately, the advertising on the can doesn’t tell the whole story, and those bubbles come at a very high price. That price can include Type 2 diabetes, seizures, loss of kidney function, various cancers, and most ironically of all, obesity.
How can diet soda cause obesity if it has no sugar, calories, fat, or carbohydrates? The human body works in many complex ways. A study published this spring found that over a nine year period, people drinking diet soda gained three times the amount of abdominal fat as those who didn’t drink diet soda.
Those who didn’t drink diet soda increased less than an inch around the waist during the nine years, while regular drinkers of diet soda added more than three inches around their middle.
Those who were only occasional diet soda drinkers increased about 1.8 inches in the midsection. This is a bad sign because the accumulation of belly fat has been highly associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and inflammation. (Granted, correlation does not imply causation.)
So why does this happen? To put it simply: artificial sweeteners. Zero-calorie sweeteners make drinks up to 600 times more sweet than regular sugar, setting the bar for satiation at a much higher level.
Another consideration is that fake sugars can change the friendly bacteria living in the gut in ways that would increase susceptibility to the insulin resistance and glucose intolerance that precedes a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes.
Women drinking two or more diet sodas a day experienced a 30% decline in their kidney function over the course of only a decade, says another study. Those researchers found that artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose were to blame for the rapid degeneration of kidney filtration rates.
Various researchers such as Dr. John Olney from Washington University and Dr. Richard Wurtman from MIT have found that artificial sweeteners create holes or lesions in the brains of lab rats fed aspartame, deform their fetuses, and lower IQs. Nerve damage, seizures, and death were also reported by these researchers. But their research was kept from the public eye while corporate research teams pumped out trumped up documents proclaiming its safety.
Renown Dr. Morando Soffritti recently confirmed what other scientists had observed as much as 30 years ago, documenting that consuming aspartame leads to a host of illness and disease that includes malignant tumors, lymphoma, leukemia, and premature death.
One of the components of aspartame is wood alcohol, an extremely poisonous chemical used in paint remover. Since its FDA approval in 1981, aspartame has been the source of 78% of complaint reports to the FDA’s Adverse Reaction Monitoring System (ARMS).
Reactions reported include memory loss, slurred speech, vision problems, and dizziness. This cluster of symptoms has become so common that it is often referred to as aspartame disease. Of course adverse symptoms reported to ARMS are a very small portion of adverse symptoms in the population.
The Dangers of Fake Sugar are Not Confined to Aspartame
Many individuals hearing about the havoc aspartame can create in the body have switched to other artificial sweeteners advertised as being ‘safe,’but that is just propaganda. Sucralose, marked as Splenda, has a similar profile of damage as aspartame, including severe chronic illness, central nervous system disorders, migraines, reduced immunity, and various cancers.
In May of 2014, the FDA gave its blessing to Advantame, a cousin of aspartame. Advantame is a blockbusting 20,000 times sweeter per gram than table sugar. You probably won’t know when you are consuming this one, because it has the feature of not breaking down in heat, making it perfect for use in commercially baked goods.
The bottom line is that artificial sweeteners are artificial creations which can compromise immunity and lead to bad outcomes. If you want to kick the artificial sweetener habit and get on the road to better health, using the correct Stevia for sweetening is the way to do it. Better yet, tone down the sweetness and really taste the components of what you are drinking by skipping sweetener altogether.
If and when I consume sugar it’s usually the “sugar in the raw” brand. I also like the stevia but the sodas take some getting used to.
It’s important to clarify several points of misinformation recently propagated by the press. First, science has repeatedly reaffirmed that low-calorie sweeteners are safe, and can help cut calories and promote weight loss. A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition verifies this fact, as well as debunks the myth that diet beverages cause an increased preference for sweet foods and beverages:
http://bit.ly/Ik4zjC. Moreover, the “research” referenced here claiming that low-calorie sweeteners change the balance of bacteria in the gut, and contribute to
weight gain is not substantiated by the body of science. Frankly, this study, which focused predominantly on rodents, is not at all a reflection of real life for humans. In other words, this diet soda is safe and these claims are no cause for alarm.
-American Beverage Association
My core litmus test for the downfall of society has been to see the amazing amount of people who think something is healthy because it says “Diet” on it. As long as that is the drink of choice for so many there really is no hope for the future because they are usually dumbed down on most other things as well.
Read the labels on everything.
I have had a horrifying diet soda habit for *decades*, drinking a liter or more daily. I am not obese, not even fat. I don’t like overly sweet foods (and in fact tend to prefer bitter things like black coffee, etc). All my markers for health are extremely high, my mental function is as excellent, and I don’t have any of the problems mentioned in this article. That said, I do think diet soda is a nasty habit. I quit from time to time, only to wind up getting back into it, because I just don’t care for tea and water all the time. Maybe I’m the exception to the rule. Or maybe there are other factors besides just the diet soda that bring on the problems noted above.
Overweight and obese people with all their associated maladies tend to drink diet soda. That the diet soda is the cause of their obesity is a specious argument.
I used to drink at least a 2 liter bottle of diet soda a day in addition to probably 20 bags a day of Sweet and Low with coffee. As an insulin dependent diabetic, I was thankful for it. My health was terrible though, and slowly got off all of it. These are Toxic Chemicals. But although Stevia is natural, it was commonly used by indigenous females in South America as a birth control method/preventative. Coincidence ?