Do you think diet sodas are better for your health? If so, many people think the same and do not know the risks of them. Advertising that each can has fewer calories and fulfills your sweet tooth craving, diet sodas have become extremely popular.
Thinking of the fewer calories, you can only wonder of how they do this. Tricking your body by using artificial sweeteners causes your body to lessen its senses to natural sugars such as fruits. While tricking your body that it is getting natural sugar, your body reacts in the same way that it would if you were to actual consume natural sugar. It causes your body to trigger insulin and begin to store fats and sugars which lead to weight gain. When studied, researchers found that diet sodas are highly more likely to lead to weight gain rather than weight loss. This could be due to the aspartame that is contained in most diet sodas that act as an artificial sweetener.
Aspartame is a natural sweetener that is addicting and is advertised to be healthier and better for your body when compared to normal sugar. However, because of the addictiveness, this causes consumers to drink more heavily. Diet soda consumers are more likely to consume more sodas per day when compared to regular soda drinkers. This is because of the addictiveness and the fact that they are tricked into believing that they are consuming around 130 less calories per can so they allow themselves to indulge a bit more.
“Over the course of about a decade, diet soda drinkers had a 70% greater increase in waist circumference compared with non-drinkers.” -Squillace
Squillace also writes about how diet sodas have the same effect on consumers teeth as constant cocaine and methamphetamine users. They have the same amount of teeth erosion due to the citric acid which decays teeth over time. Adding (diet) soda to your diet has no pros. Giving your body unnecessary sugar/fake sugar quickly adds to weight gain. Along with the unnecessary sugar, sodas have no nutritional value to them. As your body naturally craves water, drinking sodas dehydrate you and soda is probably the last thing that your body would need. Due to the weight gain from the diet sodas, this leads to vascular health problems.
Having as little as one can of diet soda a day can greatly increase your change of getting a stroke, heart attack, or other vascular health risks. According to health.com, “Excessive soda drinking could leave you looking like a Breaking Badextra, according to a case study published in the journal General Dentistry. The research compared the mouths of a cocaine-user, a methamphetamine-user, and a habitual diet-soda drinker, and found the same level of tooth erosion in each of them. The culprit here is citric acid, which weakens and destroys tooth enamel over time.”
Among these factors, diet sodas have no health benefit and are in fact worse for you than regular sodas. Reading these facts should make people think twice before consuming their next fizzy beverage and should consider fulfilling their sweet cravings with water or natural sweeteners such as fruits, but that’s none of my business.
(Research courtesy of Squillace, Mary. "10 Reasons to Give Up Diet Soda." Why You Should Stop Drinking Diet Soda. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.)
