The Ugly Truth About Diet Soda

Azdak

I did read a study that show people who consumed diet soda, on average, ate more calories than people who drank regular soda. I could go find the study, but I am feeling particularly lazy today.
From a personal standpoint, if I am dragging, I will grab a 44oz diet mt dew on my way to work. What I have noticed is I will drink less water throughout the day when i do that. Why...no idea.

I don't suppose it has anything to do with the fact that you are drinking 44 oz of fluid.....

binary_jester

I did read a study that show people who consumed diet soda, on average, ate more calories than people who drank regular soda. I could go find the study, but I am feeling particularly lazy today.
From a personal standpoint, if I am dragging, I will grab a 44oz diet mt dew on my way to work. What I have noticed is I will drink less water throughout the day when i do that. Why...no idea.

I don't suppose it has anything to do with the fact that you are drinking 44 oz of fluid.....

That is a riot. For some reason I was separating the two. I never put that towards my water count and really never thought about it that way. I almost viewed it as a food. Thanks.

alantin

How do you make those weird smileys?




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ceomrman

This is a neat topic!

A couple things - there's nothing bad about carbonation, as far as the science is concerned. If you want to believe it's evil, I can't stop you, but you're wrong. Some people might have bad responses or whatnot, of course, but the ingredients in soft drinks that are bad for you do not include carbonation.

Regarding soda and calorie consumption: this is the point of your question, and its interesting. A recent meta-analysis done by Yale researchers (that means a study of the studies that have been done so far) and published in the American Journal of Public Health (Vartanian, Schwartz, and Brownell, 2007, free on Google Scholar) found that drinking sugared soda was associated with overall higher caloric intake among participants in the 16 studies they looked at which focused on sugared soda. 16 more studies looked at diet soda or a mix of the two. It's hard to teach the stats right off the bat to anyone reading, but the researchers say that both categories were related to higher calorie intake, with r-values of 0.24 for sugared and 0.06 for mixed/diet soda. To me, in this context, a correlation of 0.24 indicates a large effect, while .06 is a moderate/small effect. it is impossible from this meta-analysis to draw conclusions about non-sugared soda in particular, though, since they only broke the studies into sugared and *mixed and/or non-sugared* groups. The 0.06 might actually be related to the sugared drinks in the "mixed or non-sugared" studies - there's no way to know.
Regarding soda and body weight: Calories don't matter, right? What we care about is maintaining a healthy weight. The same meta-study reported a 0.09 and 0.05 r-value for the relationship between overall body weight and sugar / mixed studies. Again, sugared appears worse than "mixed or non-sugared". These effects are smaller than calories alone, suggesting more is going on, but they are real, measurable effects that are not inconsequential.
Regarding soda and other health problems: Again, its not even really *weight* that many of us are concerned with - its *health*. The same meta-analysis looked at this question. Specifically, one very large and well done study on 92,000 women over 8 years found that the women who drank two or more servings of sugared beverage per day were twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as those who drank one or less per month. The amount of diet soda they drank had nothing to do with it. They controlled for caloric intake and BMI, so they were not just seeing that diet soda drinkers were more health conscious overall.
Other health effects were more modest and had less evidence, too. There's some evidence to suggest that soda drinkers have weaker bones, but that's easily enough explained by the fact that soda drinkers probably replace other beverages in their diets (like milk). That doesn't mean soda is bad, necessarily, but it suggests that it's not nutritional, in any case. Which is obvious. Some sodas are quite acidic, and most have coloring agents. The acids and colors certainly stain teeth. The acids and sugars together seem to promote tooth decay. Some of the coloring agents appear totally safe, others appear to be bad - our FDA is massively underfunded, so we don't really know for sure about lots of these chemicals. Most are probably perfectly fine. Some are probably not.
I encourage anyone who's interested to go look up that study! It's well done.
One real drawback that might actually be related to artificial sweeteners (provided you're not allergic) seems to be related to the brain's response to sweetness. It might be the case that artificial sweeteners fool the brain into releasing insulin, which is how your body regulates blood sugar. The sweet taste might cause your pancreas to release insulin to deal with the expected flood of sugar that all that sweetness on your tongue was screaming to the brain about.
But of course, your tongue was lying... there's no sugar in diet soda, so the extra insulin in your blood (IF IT IS THERE) would take out some blood sugar, causing you to have lower blood sugar. That's important because having low blood sugar can make you crave... sugar! BUT I don't think it is known yet whether the taste of artificial sugar actually triggers any meaningful insulin response. Typically, I think its reactionary - that is, the brain tells the pancreas to excrete more insulin when there's actually more sugar in the blood - not before - in which case, diet soda wouldn't affect anything. But its an interesting line of research, anyway!
Another potential problem might be even simpler. You might simply get used to very sweet tastes if eat a lot of non-sugar sweetened food. Sweeteners let you eat sweet food all the time whereas if you eat real sugar all the time, you're likely to be fat, diabetic, or dead before very long. So all that sweet might well desensitize your taste buds, so you want more sweet flavor in general. Since only some things can be or are sweetened with non-caloric sweeteners, you'd likely end up wanting to eat more sugar than otherwise.
**
Here's my own take on it, having been aware of the science for many years: sugared soda is CRAP. It is crap mainly because it is full of refined, simple sugars which wreak havoc on your poor pancreas. We are not made to eat this stuff. Back in the day, we got honey when we could beat the bears at stealing it from the bees, which means we didn't get a lot of honey! Our species has had no time to evolve along with ultra-rapidly changing diets. For 200,000 years, we barely ate any sugar. 10,000 years ago, we started eating potatoes and other not-very-good carbs as a result of agriculture. Now, bam, we eat refined white sugar, corn syrup, and similar garbage all day. Simple sugar is digested very quickly and dumped right from your gut into your blood, where of course, you really don't need it because you aren't likely to be running from a swarm of angry bees (or bears) in modern times. So your pancreas has to quick dump a bunch of insulin to prevent you from dying. Humans just suck at processing sugar.
Oh, and guess what your insulin is doing with all that sugar? It ain't going to waste. Heck, no! For 200,000 years, we never knew when there'd be a famine, or when we'd have to run for miles or when we'd twist our ankle and not be good at hunting and gathering. So our insulin takes the simple sugars and clicks them together like legos and packs them away... inside fat cells.

Artificial sweeteners might have some real drawbacks, but there's no way they're NEARLY as bad as sugar. If you're fat, CUT OUT THE SUGARED SODA. If you hate needles and don't want to get diabetes, CUT OUT THE SUGARED SODA.
If you've already done that and you're looking for help getting the rest of the way, then cutting out non-caloric sweeteners certainly won't hurt. There's even some reason to think it might help a little.

binary_jester

How do you make those weird smileys?




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I have collected quite a few to a photobucket account.

priskar

ceomrman - I've been sitting here reading the study all afternoon only to find you've posted a great synopsis of it here. Thanks!

I do agree, if you just have to have soda, sugared is probably the choice to make, Artificial sweeteners cross the blood brain barrier just like sugar and with so much controversy over what they can or cannot do to the body, why chance it? There's also the pancreatic link to consider.

I had a VSG and can never have carbonated drinks again which is okay with me. I wasn't a soda/beer drinker and if I did have a Dr. Pepper, it was one a day and it rarely got finished. But prior to my surgery I've purged my diet of artificial sweeteners and, for the most part, sugar and white starches. I can honestly say I have no cravings for anything. Curiously, on Thanksgiving, I had two small bites of the custard from the pumpkin pie but no crust. It was loaded with sugar! Too sweet tasting really but later that day and into the next I had cravings for sweets stuff. A lesson well learned. It's just not worth it to me.

JaydeSkye

I agree that artificial sweeteners aren't healthy, but the rest of what you wrote - I read it as if I were watching a Coca Cola commercial. Hahahahahhahaahaaaaaa

JaydeSkye

I agree that artificial sweeteners aren't healthy, but the rest of what you wrote - I read it as if I were watching a Coca Cola commercial. Hahahahahhahaahaaaaaa

randyv99

ceomrman - How DARE you write a longer post than me on my own message board topic. The NERVE of some people! :laugh:

Yeah I'm glad that you bothered to locate and summarize some of the research to which I've been alluding. It's really an interesting, if complicated and sometimes controversial read.

More importantly, notice how binary jester doesn't bother to shar his wonderful smilies with us. Can we say selfish?

ginnyroxx

maybe he just doesn't like you
he offered his special smiley notepad to me

neener neener :bigsmile:

eglass64

I believe the diet soda is getting the bad rap in this case. What is more likely happening is diet soda, for you, is a trigger of past bad eating behavior. Your brain associates diet soda with junk food you use to eat when you drank diet soda.

For me it's sitting in front of the TV. Not even 15 mins after sitting in front of the tube, I get urges to eat...chips, pizza, etc because that's all I use to do in the past when I sat in front of the tube for 4-5 hrs a night.

That's why it's called a BAD HABIT.:ohwell:

Im with you on this once. Its mental.