Is Your Diet Coke Making You FAT?

A regular 12-ounce soda contains the equivalent of nine teaspoons of sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Imagine drinking a 12-ounce glass of iced tea with nine teaspoons of sugar stirred into it. According to Beverage Digest, overall sales of soda (sugar and diet) are 10.2 billion cases a year. That rounds out to be about 2-½ servings per day for every man, woman and child. A 12-ounce can of soda contains about 150 calories, so why not just drink diet pop?

I LOVE diet pop. I’ve been a multiple can per day person since junior high. I’ve heard that it isn’t that great for you, but today I actually looked into it. Here’s what I found:

• Purdue University found that rats who were fed artificial sweeteners consistently ate more than the group fed high-calorie sweeteners.
• People who drink diet soda on a daily basis have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
• Diet soda often contains sodium, which exacerbates thirst, while the caffeine causes you to lose fluid.
• All carbonated sodas also contain calcium-leaching phosphoric acid, and so much acid in your system can tilt your pH balance to an unhealthy level.
• The more diet soda you drink, the less healthful beverages, like water and tea, you’re also consuming.

According to a study at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, for each can of diet soft drink consumed per day, the risk of obesity goes up by 41%. Some experts are now exploring the possibility that artificial sweeteners confuse our taste buds and all those brain measures of satiety upon which we base what we eat. By offering our tastes buds something that seems sweet, it signals other parts of our bodies that glucose sugars are on the way. We set ourselves up for cravings — to which we eventually give in. In other words, consuming artificial sweeteners that seem real just might be setting us up to eat more later on.


Try this experiment: Fill a glass with soda, diet or regular, and drop a nail into the glass. Watch it over the course of an hour or two. You’ll find that the soda eats away at the nail in a surprisingly short amount of time. Now think of what it can do to living stomach tissue!