Are you trying to lose weight? Don’t drink diet soda!
Yes, you read that right! We are definitely telling you that diet soda is actually bad for you! Research and studies have proved what the low-calorie diet drinks you sip as an alternative to regular cola and soda drink contains compounds that derail all your efforts to sport the sexy and slim figure you’ve always wanted.
If we’re trying to lose weight, the first thing we tend to do is cut down on sugar. So it is only natural for those of us with an insatiable sweet tooth to turn to diet drinks to satisfy our sugar cravings, yet keep the pounds off. But, as it turns out, that is a mistake! Adverse diet soda side effects are actually much worse than the calories you are saving – at least you can burn them off!
The Danger Zone
A study in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism contends that low calorie drinks are full of artificial sweeteners that could upset your metabolism. Artificial sweeteners change how our body responds to sugar, adds Susan Swithers at the Purdue University, in an interview about diet soda side effects with Fox News.
When a person consumes sugar the mechanism in our body releases hormones to transform it into energy. However when this mechanism is exposed to something that tastes like sugar but injects no sugar in the blood system it goes crazy, Swithers explains.
According to Swithers, who also contributes to Purdue’s Ingestive Behavior Research Centre, your metabolism ends up craving for more, leading to overeating and subsequently high blood sugar level.
The Mind Games
Diet soda side effects include what we call “mind games”. Because they are low in calories – some diet versions of regular soft drinks have as little as three calories per liter – they tend to trick us into thinking we can eat more. The end result is that we take in more calories than we should, ultimately gaining weight.
The American Beverage Association insists that low-calorie beverages are safe and effective in weight loss. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics also supports the argument given by the association and rejects diet soda side effects as baseless. However,
After all, the beverage industry has a huge consumer market to serve. An estimate puts the production numbers of soft drinks in US somewhere around 10.4 billion a year. That makes it about 12-ounce of sugar-loaded soda (an average 150 calories) for every American a day throughout a year, according to a report by the Harvard School of Public Health.
The same report highlights yet another revealing fact about the obesity epidemic in America. It says obese and overweight people accounted for 45 percent in mid-60s. Now, the percentage points have shot up to 66 percent today, it says.
Setting the Stage for Type 2 Diabetes
It is no secret that sugar can potentially lead to type-2 diabetes. The Nurses’ Health Study, referred in the Harvard’s report, assessed 90,000 women for eight years and discovered a strong link between sugary drinks and type-2 diabetes.
This makes it seem logical that people would be attracted towards artificially sweetened drinks to keep themselves safe from diabetes. You’d be surprised to know that diet soda side effects include its ability to cause diabetes too!
A latest study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that followed more than 66,000 women from 1993, discovered 1,369 cases of type-2 diabetes in the group consuming artificially-sweetened beverages. Susan Swithers at the Purdue University explains this is a natural consequence of your body’s mechanism going haywire when it tastes sugar, but doesn’t find any!
Swithers explains that the taste of sugar causes your body to produce insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels. But when there is no sugar in your system, your body eventually comes to think of this as a “false alarm”, and cuts down on insulin production. As a result, when you do switch back to regular sugar, your body will not produce insulin in sufficient quantities to deal with the situation. This is when you officially have diabetes!