diet soda...good or evil???

I'm no expert on the topic, but I do know that they definitely aren't the best for you. You should avoid drinking them on a regular basis and opt for water or sparkling mineral water instead (Sparkling Ice is my new favorite drink!). But sometimes I just really, really want a soda and I will occasionally grab a coke zero. I think moderation is the key with diet sodas.

cmon really??? is this a serious question.....Lametard

Question

Diet soda: Is it bad for you?

I drink diet soda every day. Could this be harmful?

Answer

from Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.

Drinking a reasonable amount of diet soda a day, such as a can or two, isn't likely to hurt you. The artificial sweeteners and other chemicals currently used in diet soda are safe for most people, and there's no credible evidence that these ingredients cause cancer.

Some types of diet soda are even fortified with vitamins and minerals. But diet soda isn't a health drink or a silver bullet for weight loss. Although switching from regular soda to diet soda may save you calories in the short term, it's not yet clear if it's effective for preventing obesity and related health problems.

Healthier low-calorie choices abound, including water, skim milk, and unsweetened tea or coffee.

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.