Addicted to diet coke.. help :(
Replies
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BreezeDoveal wrote: »It contains aspartame, which causes cancer:
http://www.3dmusclejourney.com/aspartame-jordan-day/Cancer Proven from Aspartame
Arguably the most spoken of talk point of many anti-aspartame zealots are the experiments done on rats. *The link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1392232/ provides a ton of information on studies regarding lab testing involving aspartame and rats, yielding inconclusive evidence against popularized theories. Included are a couple just to prove a point:
In 1981, Ishii conducted research dosing aspartame to rats. He used 86 males and 86 females, dosing 0, 1, 2, or 4 g/kg bw/day from weeks 6 to 110 . The statistical variance in bodyweight discrepancy when comparing a rat to a man needs to be taken into account, and dosage would still remain proportionate to the body weight of the subject. The highest dose in this study was 4 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day. This means that for a 200 pound man (90.909 kilograms) times 4 grams of aspartame per kilo gives you…363.63 grams every single day. One final computation to get back to milligrams so we are on the same playing field as our previous studies: 1000 mg= 1 g, so that gives us 363,363 milligrams of aspartame administered to a 200 pound man. Do you remember what the average consumption of an American is? 5 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, so for our example, 455 milligrams. The most interesting part of this would not even be the insanely high dosage of the sweetener, but that there was no increase in the incidence of brain tumors. So at literally 800 times the dose that one would consume on a day to day basis, over the duration of more than two years, there was nothing significant to compare to the control group. Just as a friendly reminder, a can of Diet Coke has 180 milligrams of aspartame.
There were though, some studies that indicate negative effects, cancer incidences, and the like. The thing with those is that they can be easily refuted, based on the sole understanding of dosage. In a popular study used to bash this sweetener, in order for there to be a statistical significance, the dosage of aspartame used was 2,500 mg/kg, which simply is not plausible. At the end of the day, everything is toxic at the right dose. That is like getting a study published when 50 subjects aged 30-40 received a dose of 3,000 grams of salt intravenously to see the mortality rate. (Then the headlines on the news would be “Study confirms that salt may lead to an early death.”) Looking over a toxicology report showing the LD50 (essentially the dose that will kill 50% of a given population) it is easy to see that even things you would never think could bring death, can, at the right dose. News reports over the years show people overdosing on water and drugs but anything can be deadly, in the right amount. Caffeine being roughly 200 mg/kg of bodyweight and Vitamin D being 10 mg/kg. The dosage makes the poison.
The bottom line is that there is simply not enough evidence to prove aspartame as carcinogenic over not, and even those that have even the slightest hint in their desired direction are easily picked apart and dissected down to nothing.
So, to sum this up, I figured it might be a little easier to relate all this back to the main point, our safety as consumers.
Nope, aspartame does not "cause" cancer as far as we know right now. And even if it does, it's too soon to tell if aspartame has any negative effects on humans (it took smoking decades to be found harmful). There may be some studies to suggest that there *may* be a relationship, but the research on this is largely inconclusive. Plus, don't use the word "cause" when talking about scientific research (like X causes Y). A significant relationship may have been found, but it cannot be determined that X is absolutely 100% the cause of Y.
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pianoplaya94 wrote: »BreezeDoveal wrote: »It contains aspartame, which causes cancer:
http://www.3dmusclejourney.com/aspartame-jordan-day/Cancer Proven from Aspartame
Arguably the most spoken of talk point of many anti-aspartame zealots are the experiments done on rats. *The link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1392232/ provides a ton of information on studies regarding lab testing involving aspartame and rats, yielding inconclusive evidence against popularized theories. Included are a couple just to prove a point:
In 1981, Ishii conducted research dosing aspartame to rats. He used 86 males and 86 females, dosing 0, 1, 2, or 4 g/kg bw/day from weeks 6 to 110 . The statistical variance in bodyweight discrepancy when comparing a rat to a man needs to be taken into account, and dosage would still remain proportionate to the body weight of the subject. The highest dose in this study was 4 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day. This means that for a 200 pound man (90.909 kilograms) times 4 grams of aspartame per kilo gives you…363.63 grams every single day. One final computation to get back to milligrams so we are on the same playing field as our previous studies: 1000 mg= 1 g, so that gives us 363,363 milligrams of aspartame administered to a 200 pound man. Do you remember what the average consumption of an American is? 5 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, so for our example, 455 milligrams. The most interesting part of this would not even be the insanely high dosage of the sweetener, but that there was no increase in the incidence of brain tumors. So at literally 800 times the dose that one would consume on a day to day basis, over the duration of more than two years, there was nothing significant to compare to the control group. Just as a friendly reminder, a can of Diet Coke has 180 milligrams of aspartame.
There were though, some studies that indicate negative effects, cancer incidences, and the like. The thing with those is that they can be easily refuted, based on the sole understanding of dosage. In a popular study used to bash this sweetener, in order for there to be a statistical significance, the dosage of aspartame used was 2,500 mg/kg, which simply is not plausible. At the end of the day, everything is toxic at the right dose. That is like getting a study published when 50 subjects aged 30-40 received a dose of 3,000 grams of salt intravenously to see the mortality rate. (Then the headlines on the news would be “Study confirms that salt may lead to an early death.”) Looking over a toxicology report showing the LD50 (essentially the dose that will kill 50% of a given population) it is easy to see that even things you would never think could bring death, can, at the right dose. News reports over the years show people overdosing on water and drugs but anything can be deadly, in the right amount. Caffeine being roughly 200 mg/kg of bodyweight and Vitamin D being 10 mg/kg. The dosage makes the poison.
The bottom line is that there is simply not enough evidence to prove aspartame as carcinogenic over not, and even those that have even the slightest hint in their desired direction are easily picked apart and dissected down to nothing.
So, to sum this up, I figured it might be a little easier to relate all this back to the main point, our safety as consumers.
Nope, aspartame does not "cause" cancer as far as we know right now. And even if it does, it's too soon to tell if aspartame has any negative effects on humans (it took smoking decades to be found harmful). There may be some studies to suggest that there *may* be a relationship, but the research on this is largely inconclusive. Plus, don't use the word "cause" when talking about scientific research (like X causes Y). A significant relationship may have been found, but it cannot be determined that X is absolutely 100% the cause of Y.
Sorry, but we have studied these sweeteners for over 30 years now.
From its creation in the 1960's to its approval by the FDA in 1981 aspartame has been repeatedly proven safe for consumption.
In addition to countless AMERICAN peer reviewed studies on its safety it has been studied by numerous OTHER countries all over the world who have concluded the same exact thing.
Sorry guys, when its repeatedly proven safe all over the world for years and years and years you've got to give this nonsense up.15 -
BreezeDoveal wrote: »Conniebythesea70 wrote: »It is hard, as I was addicted too but you can do it! There is nothing but POSITIVES that can come out of putting fewer chemicals in your body be it, food or drinks! Good luck!
Do you mean all chemicals? Including hydrogen dioxide?
Is that like dihydrogen monoxide? I once read that chemical kills a lot of people.
That's the one. It's a killer and it's all around us. In the air, in our rivers, in our homes. The Government refuses to do anything about it!7 -
Thanks everyone ! You've been a great help ! I guess people are not educated enough on these things 4
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I think many posters have already covered the top points, it doesn't impact weight loss, it's not that bad for you, etc.
However, if you want to cut back, it has upsides. I sleep better and I save a lot of money on beverages.
I was horrendously addicted to caffeine while I was in graduate school. I was consuming coffee and diet coke from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. My tolerance for caffeine was sky high, my sleep was never really restful, and I had constant stomach aches.
After school was over, I slowly weaned myself off, I drink a few cups of coffee throughout the morning now, and have a soda occasionally in the afternoon or evening. I feel more rested when I wake up, and caffeine has gone back to being an energy boost, rather than necessary for functioning. :-)
I cant' offer any advice to the not liking water though...I don't understand that. It tastes like nothing...I don't understand how you can actively dislike the taste of water?3 -
@healthy491 if water makes you gag maybe try Mio or another water flavouring that is low calorie. I see no need for you to give up your diet soda, but 4 litres a day is a lot. Maybe trim to 2 litres a day and in between flavour water with Mio.
Yes there is a lot of information out there. I imagine an important modern skill is to evaluate all the evidence and filter out the unsubstantiated/debunked.2 -
If you are looking to just avoid the aspertame Diet Pepsi no longer has it in their soda. However it does uses another artificial sweetener and, personally, not as tasty as Diet Coke, or in my case Coke Zero.
If you are looking to quit dring soda altogether or at least cut back, I would recommend favored soda/seltzer water. Soda/Seltzer water, like LaCroix, may take sometimes to get use to the taste or lack there of. However, it is no different then getting use to drinking unsweetened tea or coffee. Drink soda/seltzer will help you cut back on caffeine that you would be consuming form Diet Coke.
If you are looking to avoid carbonation beverages altogether. Tea is great, there seems to be a million different times of teas, and depending on the tea it can taste great cold and just as well hot. Just make sure you don't or at least limit the the amount of sugar/sweetener you apply to the tea to prevent unnecessary calories.
If you are just looking to stars drinking more water, I would recommend buying a water infuser, or at least start adding fresh fruit to your water. The infuser just helps keeping the fruit contain. I have one and use it all the time and it always me to have more then boring old lemon water. I make water all the time with strawberries, blueberries, and kiwis and it's amazing.0 -
Know what's more likely to contribute to cancer in humans, at least more than the small amounts of artificial sweeteners in diet soda? Obesity.
What is known about the relationship between obesity and cancer? (http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/obesity-fact-sheet#q3)
If diet soda is something that helps you reach a decently healthy weight range and you feel ok about the small amounts of sodium and sweeteners contained therein, you can keep drinking it. If you feel like you want to cut back and aren't too keen on plain water, you can try unsweetened iced tea or plain club soda with a splash of juice. Pomegranate and club soda is delicious. So is lemon & lime, or a few muddled strawberries or raspberries.2 -
I've been drinking diet soda for at least 30 years. Every single day, multiple cans. 30 years of artificial sweetener and I have no negative health problems because of this. I've lost a ton of weight while drinking a 2 liter + a day. There is nothing wrong with it.
While I absolutely agree that there is a great deal of mythology around artificial sweeteners-and I do have Diet Coke from time-to-time, this very same argument was presented to me in the 70's, but about Lucky Strikes.
The fact that product-X hasn't harmed me is not strong evidence that product-X doesn't pose health risks.
But I totally agree that the solid scientific evidence to support all the scare-mongering regarding artificial sweeteners is non-existent.
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OP, please ignore the posts by BreezeDoveal. They're trolling to derail the thread.3
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It is a hard habit to kick but you should try. I drank about 4-6 regular Pepsi's per day for years. Some days the bulk of my calorie intake would come from soda. For the past several years I would give it up for Lent & suffer through the caffeine withdrawal headaches. Oftentimes I would substitute something else like juice or Fresca which is the only diet soda I can stomach.
Then when I really started to get serious about weight loss. I just quit. Since July 1 of this year I have only had 1 Pepsi & I drank that for the caffeine. Having not had a soda in so long, I was WIRED.
Part of giving it up is the choice to give it up. There may not be many calories in it, and I doubt it causes cancer but re-read how much other unnatural garbage is in 1 serving. Do one of those tests for yourself where you pour the soda on something & watch the corrosive effects at work. It's gross.
I do think the carbonation causes bloating & that the chemicals do something to sabotage your weight loss efforts. I think that those parts of the studies talking about diet soda contributing to weight gain have at least kernels of legitimacy.
I'm not going to preach to you to stop but try your best to cut down your intake even gradually. For the rest of the month have one less soda each day & see how you feel come September. Then eliminate one more& so on & so on. Just get it down to a more manageable level1 -
healthy491 wrote: »rainbowbow wrote: »doesn't cause weight gain, doesn't cause diabetes, doesn't cause cancer, etc. etc. etc.
The only worry i'd have consuming the amount you're talking about is the damage to your teeth or potential Reflux/Acid symptoms.
Really ? Thanks literally EVERYONE tells me how bad it is for my health and that I should stop
Me too, I'm always told it rots your insides! I'm addicted to the stuff too have you tried flavoured water? Or fizzy water?0 -
I drank a lot of diet coke about 10 years ago and my dentist recommended drinking it with a straw for the benefit of my teeth.1
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BreezeDoveal wrote: »rainbowbow wrote: »pianoplaya94 wrote: »BreezeDoveal wrote: »It contains aspartame, which causes cancer:
http://www.3dmusclejourney.com/aspartame-jordan-day/Cancer Proven from Aspartame
Arguably the most spoken of talk point of many anti-aspartame zealots are the experiments done on rats. *The link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1392232/ provides a ton of information on studies regarding lab testing involving aspartame and rats, yielding inconclusive evidence against popularized theories. Included are a couple just to prove a point:
In 1981, Ishii conducted research dosing aspartame to rats. He used 86 males and 86 females, dosing 0, 1, 2, or 4 g/kg bw/day from weeks 6 to 110 . The statistical variance in bodyweight discrepancy when comparing a rat to a man needs to be taken into account, and dosage would still remain proportionate to the body weight of the subject. The highest dose in this study was 4 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day. This means that for a 200 pound man (90.909 kilograms) times 4 grams of aspartame per kilo gives you…363.63 grams every single day. One final computation to get back to milligrams so we are on the same playing field as our previous studies: 1000 mg= 1 g, so that gives us 363,363 milligrams of aspartame administered to a 200 pound man. Do you remember what the average consumption of an American is? 5 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, so for our example, 455 milligrams. The most interesting part of this would not even be the insanely high dosage of the sweetener, but that there was no increase in the incidence of brain tumors. So at literally 800 times the dose that one would consume on a day to day basis, over the duration of more than two years, there was nothing significant to compare to the control group. Just as a friendly reminder, a can of Diet Coke has 180 milligrams of aspartame.
There were though, some studies that indicate negative effects, cancer incidences, and the like. The thing with those is that they can be easily refuted, based on the sole understanding of dosage. In a popular study used to bash this sweetener, in order for there to be a statistical significance, the dosage of aspartame used was 2,500 mg/kg, which simply is not plausible. At the end of the day, everything is toxic at the right dose. That is like getting a study published when 50 subjects aged 30-40 received a dose of 3,000 grams of salt intravenously to see the mortality rate. (Then the headlines on the news would be “Study confirms that salt may lead to an early death.”) Looking over a toxicology report showing the LD50 (essentially the dose that will kill 50% of a given population) it is easy to see that even things you would never think could bring death, can, at the right dose. News reports over the years show people overdosing on water and drugs but anything can be deadly, in the right amount. Caffeine being roughly 200 mg/kg of bodyweight and Vitamin D being 10 mg/kg. The dosage makes the poison.
The bottom line is that there is simply not enough evidence to prove aspartame as carcinogenic over not, and even those that have even the slightest hint in their desired direction are easily picked apart and dissected down to nothing.
So, to sum this up, I figured it might be a little easier to relate all this back to the main point, our safety as consumers.
Nope, aspartame does not "cause" cancer as far as we know right now. And even if it does, it's too soon to tell if aspartame has any negative effects on humans (it took smoking decades to be found harmful). There may be some studies to suggest that there *may* be a relationship, but the research on this is largely inconclusive. Plus, don't use the word "cause" when talking about scientific research (like X causes Y). A significant relationship may have been found, but it cannot be determined that X is absolutely 100% the cause of Y.
Sorry, but we have studied these sweeteners for over 30 years now.
From its creation in the 1960's to its approval by the FDA in 1981 aspartame has been repeatedly proven safe for consumption.
In addition to countless AMERICAN peer reviewed studies on its safety it has been studied by numerous OTHER countries all over the world who have concluded the same exact thing.
Sorry guys, when its repeatedly proven safe all over the world for years and years and years you've got to give this nonsense up.
Sounds like arguing by sticking your fingers in your ears.
http://www.3dmusclejourney.com/aspartame-jordan-day/
^collects all the evidence.
Yet you clearly haven't read your own reference:
"The bottom line is that there is simply not enough evidence to prove aspartame as carcinogenic over not, and even those that have even the slightest hint in their desired direction are easily picked apart and dissected down to nothing."
Enough said.5 -
I think many posters have already covered the top points, it doesn't impact weight loss, it's not that bad for you, etc.
However, if you want to cut back, it has upsides. I sleep better and I save a lot of money on beverages.
I was horrendously addicted to caffeine while I was in graduate school. I was consuming coffee and diet coke from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. My tolerance for caffeine was sky high, my sleep was never really restful, and I had constant stomach aches.
After school was over, I slowly weaned myself off, I drink a few cups of coffee throughout the morning now, and have a soda occasionally in the afternoon or evening. I feel more rested when I wake up, and caffeine has gone back to being an energy boost, rather than necessary for functioning. :-)
I cant' offer any advice to the not liking water though...I don't understand that. It tastes like nothing...I don't understand how you can actively dislike the taste of water?
Water, particularly tap water (or any non reverse osmosis water) has minerals and other things in it that impart flavor.
My willingness to drink plain water is highly dependent on where I am. I refuse to buy bottled water routinely.3 -
Part of giving it up is the choice to give it up. There may not be many calories in it, and I doubt it causes cancer but re-read how much other unnatural garbage is in 1 serving. Do one of those tests for yourself where you pour the soda on something & watch the corrosive effects at work. It's gross.
I do think the carbonation causes bloating & that the chemicals do something to sabotage your weight loss efforts.
If you're wanting to mimic the effect of soda on your body, be sure the object you're pouring it on has the same physiology as your stomach. Its corrosion of metal, for instance, has no bearing on our bodies unless you're ingesting metal.
And the 'chemicals' don't sabotage weight loss.
It's completely up to an individual on wether they drink sodas/diet sodas or not, but everyone should be aware of the scientific facts.4
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