What are diet drinks?
Diet sodas are typically sugar-free, artificially sweetened and non-alcoholic carbonated beverages. They are generally marketed toward health-conscious people, diabetics, athletes, and other people who want to lose weight, improve physical fitness, or reduce their sugar intake.
Health effects of drinking diet soda
Messed-Up Metabolism
According to a 2008 University of Minnesota study of almost 10,000 adults, even just one diet soda a day is linked to a 34% higher risk of metabolic syndrome, the group of symptoms including belly fat and high cholesterol that puts you at risk for heart disease. Whether that link is attributed to an ingredient in diet soda or the drinkers' eating habits is unclear. But is that one can really worth it?
Kidney Problems
Here's something you didn't know about your diet soda: It might be bad for your kidneys. In an 11-year-long Harvard Medical School study of more than 3,000 women, researchers found that diet cola is associated with a two-fold increased risk for kidney decline. Kidney function started declining when women drank more than two sodas a day. Even more interesting: Since kidney decline was not associated with sugar-sweetened sodas, researchers suspect that the diet sweeteners are responsible.
Obesity
You read that right: Diet soda doesn't help you lose weight after all. A University of Texas Health Science Center study found that the more diet sodas a person drank, the greater their risk of becoming overweight. Downing just two or more cans a day increased waistlines by 500%. Why? Artificial sweeteners can disrupt the body's natural ability to regulate calorie intake based on the sweetness of foods, suggested an animal study from Purdue University. That means people who consume diet foods might be more likely to overeat, because your body is being tricked into thinking it's eating sugar, and you crave more.
A Terrible Hangover
Your first bad decision was ordering that Vodka Diet--and you may make the next one sooner than you thought. Cocktails made with diet soda get you drunker, faster, according to a study out of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia. That's because sugar-free mixers allow liquor to enter your bloodstream much quicker than those with sugar, leaving you with a bigger buzz.
Cell Damage
Diet sodas contain something many regular sodas don't: mold inhibitors. They go by the names sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate, and they're in nearly all diet sodas. But many regular sodas, such as Coke and Pepsi, don't contain this preservative.
That's bad news for diet drinkers. "These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it--they knock it out altogether," Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told a British newspaper in 1999. The preservative has also been linked to hives, asthma, and other allergic conditions, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Since then, some companies have phased out sodium benzoate. Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi have replaced it with another preservative, potassium benzoate. Both sodium and potassium benzoate were classified by the Food Commission in the UK as mild irritants to the skin, eyes, and mucous membranes.
Rotting Teeth
With a pH of 3.2, diet soda is very acidic. (As a point of reference, the pH of battery acid is 1. Water is 7.) The acid is what readily dissolves enamel, and just because a soda is diet doesn't make it acid-light. Adults who drink three or more sodas a day have worse dental health, says a University of Michigan analysis of dental checkup data. Soda drinkers had far greater decay, more missing teeth, and more fillings.
Reproductive Issues
Sometimes, the vessel for your beverage is just as harmful. Diet or not, soft drink cans are coated with the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA), which has been linked to everything from heart disease to obesity to reproductive problems. That's a lot of risktaking for one can of pop.
New Research- Diet Drinks Do Not Increase Appetite
Diet drinks do not increase people's appetite or cause them to eat a lot of sugary or fatty foods any more than water does, according to a new study. The research came from a team of experts led by Carmen Piernas, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, and was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. These findings contradict prior research which has indicated that drinks containing artificial sweeteners can disrupt hormones associated with hunger, resulting in the consumption of more food. Studies have also shown that diet sodas make people have the desire to eat more sweet treats, meaning they end up eating more high-calorie foods. This study has shown that diet beverages may not be as bad as people believe. The researchers observed 318 overweight or obese adults in North Carolina who consumed 280 or more calories in drinks every day. Half of the subjects replaced at least two daily servings of sugary drinks with water for the purpose of the study, while the other half replaced them with diet drinks, including:
Diet Mountain Dew
Diet Lipton Tea
Diet Coke
The participants reported their consumption of food and water on two different days after three and six months. The water and diet groups lowered their average daily calories relative to the beginning of the investigation, from between 2,000 and 2,300 calories to 1,500 to 1,800 calories. The water and diet drinkers consumed a comparable amount of fat, sugar, carbohydrates, and total calories at both three and six months. The only differences found were that at six months in, the water drinkers had more fruit and veggies in their diet and the diet drinkers did not eat as much dessert, compared to their diets before the study.
Vasanti Malik, a nutrition researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, said in an interview with Reuters "That's sort of the opposite of what you would expect if consumption of diet soda increased the preference for sweets." Malik was not involved in the study. This does not mean that drinking diet drinks are not bad for people at all, however. A different report, also from the same journal, demonstrated that people who consumed drinks that consisted of either real or artificial sugar had a higher chance of developing diabetes over 14 years than water drinkers. Another study found that sweetened or diet drinks are linked to a greater risk of depression. Scientists have also shown that although diet sodas have fewer calories, they do not lower the risk of cardiovascular problems or stroke. In the study by Piernas and colleagues, the participants were all overweight, she warned, so the results might not apply to people of average weight who consume diet drinks.
Malik added concluded,"We're trying to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage intake in the population for obesity, so the next logical question is: what substitutes can be used? I think (diet beverages) can be consumed in moderation, along with other beverages - water, coconut water, sparkling water, that type of thing."
(Source- American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)
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