As an avid diet coke drinker, I often hear from parents and peers how much worse for me diet soda is than regular soda. When I put Splenda instead of pure cane sugar on my food or in my drinks, I hear the same, that it’s worse for me. The rumor is that artificial sweeteners are worse for your body and give you more cravings? Is this true? And if so, why?

Today, society’s big time producers are under pressure to make healthier products. This includes less calories or if possible, zero. The calories from soda comes primarily from sugar so when producers take and the sugar, they create a zero calorie product. Sounds ideal right?

Well according to Business Insider’s Robert Ferris, diet sodas may actually be worse for your health and your waistline than ones with sugar. The most commonly used sweeteners are aspartame, sucralose, and saccharine. It turns out they might disarray with our bodies’ abilities to process the calories from authentic sweet things thus making it harder for us to metabolize the sugars we get from other sources.

Purdue University scientist Susan Swithers found in a meta-analysis of 26 health and diet studies that artificially sweetened sodas, unlike water, were often still associated with many of the same ailments common in people who drink sugary sodas, and may actually increase the risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes (BusinessInsider). Furthermore, Swithers says the trouble with artificial sweeteners is the same thing that makes them so popular, “they taste a lot like sugar and have few or zero calories. For example, the molecule for sucralose (found in products like Splenda), is extremely similar to the molecule for sugar. That is why it tastes eerily similar, it is tricking our bodies into thinking we are eating something sugary.”

On the contrary, CNN’s Jacque Wilson reports of a study conducted by the American Beverage Association, found that diet soda drinkers who continued to drink soda while on a diet lost more weight than diet soda drinkers who stopped. According to Dr. Jim Hill, a researcher on the study, the results weren’t surprising. Those who had to give up diet soda were relying on more willpower to stick to their diets than those who allowed themselves the small indulgence without the added calories, he says.

The data Swithers examines does not establish a direct cause and effect relationship between sweeteners and obesity, it simply sees a strong correlation just as strong as we see with regular soda. There could be other explanations.

A lot of studies suggest that over time whatever calories people think they are cutting with artificial sweeteners might just be returning to them in the form of poorly metabolized sugars from other foods but if they aren’t eating too many sugars from other foods, diet soda can be beneficial.

http://blog.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/2013/04/23/food-fight-regular-soda-vs-diet-soda/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/24/health/soda-makers-cut-calories/

http://www.businessinsider.com/diet-soda-may-not-be-any-better-for-you-2013-7