A common recommendation to people trying to lose weight is to cut out soft drinks in favor of diet soda. However, as more and more research come out, these zero-calorie, artificially sweetened beverages are shown to be as bad or even worse for a person than the soda they originally gave up.
As someone who grew up drinking diet soda, as it was the only thing that my mom would buy thinking it was healthier because of the zero calorie label, I was curious to see if my continuation of this habit is dangerous to my health. As I looked into research, I began to see that more and more studies show that these types of sodas are negatively impacting the health of calorie-conscious consumers in ways more significant than the calories and sugar from normal soft drinks.
This article from Today.com cites research that confirms that negative effect of diet sodas. One piece of research is from the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, which compiled evidence from recent literature on this topic and actually found that artificial sweeteners have “a variety of negative health outcomes, especially in adults.”
The Today article itself ponders whether or not the unhealthy nature of diet soda is due to psychological reasons, such as people thinking they’re healthy, therefore eating more sugary food to compensate. Additionally, they mention that people drinking diet soda tend to be heavier and actually are more at risk regardless.
Susan Swithers, professor or behavioral sciences at Purdue says that the research is hard to explain by these ideas. She instead suggests that it could possibly be due to your body expecting a lot of sugar when you drink that sweet sip of diet soda, and then your stomach expects a high level of energy to arrive following the sweet flavor, and when it never comes, your body is inefficient at handling the utilization of food.
My own personal analysis on this is that diet soda is not “healthy”, but I don’t think it is necessarily harmful. I think that the evidence provided by Dr. Swithers explains a reason why it would be unhealthy to drink diet soda in excess, but if you have it in moderation, it couldn’t be that bad for you.
While it would be unhealthy to drink it every day, small amounts of this would likely not ruin your body’s ability to process food effectively. However, thinking of opportunity cost versus danger and risk, I definitely will be cutting down on my diet soda consumption because I really don’t lose anything by instead simply choosing Swithers recommended diet drink, water.
Many people are deceived by marketing strategy of the companies that produce such goods. I really agree that psychological factors are in play here. Unhealthy people blindly tend to believe that drinking diet sodas would contain less calories and go on to consume too much. In that case, they would end up with worse health conditions than before. It is a tragedy.
I know plenty of people who the Today article could be describing. Lots of people brag that they exclusively drink diet soda, but they always drink it excess. I agree that despite the slight health benefits in choosing diet over regular, the psychological decision that you can drink more diet than regular soda often makes diet the wrong choice. At least with non-diet soda, I get a healthy dose of guilt with it.
I love this post! I have always been torn when drinking a soda with the decision of whether or not to buy a diet soda or a regular one. Your facts are very helpful and informative. Although it is very bizarre, when i drink soda I fill half of the cup with normal Coke and the other half with diet. I’m positive it does not do anything but in my mind I could argue that I am only consuming half the bad effects of each one. I don’t usually drink soda a lot so either way it does not pose that large of a threat.