diet soda...good or evil???

Not so hot for you... try Zevia (sweetened with Stevia). Or use sparkling mineral water and add flavored Stevia to it, it tastes great when you want the flavor without HFCS or the toxic chemicals in diet drinks. When I drank regular diet soda I had headaches all of the time... I only get them now when I'm sick.

There's flavored Stevia?? I am so excited right now :flowerforyou:

YES!!! My favorites are Kal brand; Caramel Cream, Chocolate Cardamom, Coconut, Hazelnut and in SweetLeaf; English Toffee, Vanilla Cream, Cola, Root Beer.

There have been NO CREDIBLE studies done that diet pops are harmful to humans. Rats, sure... but in HUGE quantities.

I'm a scientist and I wrote a blog post about it. http://crunchyscientist.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/obesity-carbohydrates-diet-drinks-and-correlation-studies/

But basically: My husband has in the past brought up the idea of diet drinks causing weight gain and although I explained this fallacy to him at the time, he recently brought it up again. He said he “heard that diet drinks cause weight gain because people who drink diet drinks gained more weight over years than those who don’t”. I decided to try to find where he heard this and came up with nada. The interwebs seem to have started and circulated this rumor because there isn’t a Pubmed article I could find with this claim. Some counter arguments were raised on other websites saying that the study called 2lbs “weight gain” and it was a pure correlation study.

Really, what it comes down to is that no one has any idea what possible biological mechanism could cause an artificial sweetener that does not affect insulin levels and has no calories to have anything to do with weight.

Two articles did catch my attention though:



See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17992188 for more



See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21696306

These articles discuss diet and weight gain, saying

Within each 4-year period, participants gained an average of 3.35 lb (5th to 95th percentile, -4.1 to 12.4). On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary components, 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (-0.22 lb), whole grains (-0.37 lb), fruits (-0.49 lb), nuts (-0.57 lb), and yogurt (-0.82 lb) (P≤0.005 for each comparison). Aggregate dietary changes were associated with substantial differences in weight change (3.93 lb across quintiles of dietary change). Other lifestyle factors were also independently associated with weight change (P<0.001), including physical activity (-1.76 lb across quintiles); alcohol use (0.41 lb per drink per day), smoking (new quitters, 5.17 lb; former smokers, 0.14 lb), sleep (more weight gain with <6 or >8 hours of sleep), and television watching (0.31 lb per hour per day).

and

There is no clear evidence that altering the proportion of total carbohydrate in the diet is an important determinant of energy intake. However, there is evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages do not induce satiety to the same extent as solid forms of carbohydrate, and that increases in sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption are associated with weight gain. Findings from studies on the effect of the dietary glycemic index on body weight have not been consistent.

In fact, replacing sugary drinks with diet drinks DOES decrease BMI in children [citation], which also presumably be the case in adults.

What’s the take home message? Don’t jump on a bandwagon without reading the studies yourself.

I'm tired of arguing with this professor all over the internets, so I'm posting this now.. last comment. Ratskep has the whole mess if you're interested. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/are-artificial-sweeteners-safe/

It's neither good nor evil...it just is. It's a carbonated drink. It lacks the ability to be good or evil. Drink it...or don't. Whatever floats your boat.

I have bigger things to worry about than Deh Ebil Dietz Zodaz.

Hell, I'm gonna die of something eventually. If I worry about all the incremental ways it might happen I'll be miserable.

I like Diet Coke, the taste, the caffiene, etc. I'm more focused on life changes in diet and exercise that have an appreciable impact. But that's just me.

I don't smoke, hardly ever drink, eat a balanced diet, exercise... Hell if a little Diet Dr. Pepper is my vice, I figure I'm ahead of many americans... :P