If you’re trying to save your diet by popping open a can of zero-calorie, aspartame-laden goodness, think again because this tasty little beverage can sabotage your weight loss altogether, and even make you put on some pounds, data from a new study shows.
Reading my other article about Why Drinking Soda Can Destroy Your Health will show you that the sweet and bubbly pick-you-upper can lower you immune system in just 10 minutes after consumption, destroy your teeth, and make you gain weight, among many others. In my article, I also touched on the reasons why diet soda is even more evil, but now there is additional data to back up my claims, as reported by WebMD.
The eight-year study was conducted by Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, and studied 1,550 Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white Americans. The age range for the group of participants was 25-64, and while soft drink consumption in general was definitively linked to obesity and weight gain, interestingly, obesity and risk of weight gain were drastically higher in those who consumed artificially sweetened diet sodas rather than regular soda.
To risk weight gain and obesity, one does not need to guzzle a large amount of soda, either. If you consume just one-half to one can of regular (sugar-containing) soda per day, your risk of becoming overweight or obese rises by 30.4%. If you drink one-half to one can of diet soda (artificially sweetened soda) per day, your risk jumps even higher–37.5%. You would be more than doubling your risk of becoming overweight or obese if you drank just one to two cans of diet soda, as this would elevate your risk for becoming more than pleasantly plump all the way to 54.5%. Fowler states that, “For each can of diet soft drink consumed each day, a person’s risk of obesity went up 41%.” (DeNoon, 2007).
While it clearly seems that the ingredients in diet soda directly cause one to become obese, Fowler, facilitator of the study, explains that diet soda is nothing more than a “marker” for obesity, and that there is no proof that it is the reason why people gain weight, since there are other factors that play a role in weight gain.
Fowler has one theory on why diet soda may contribute to weight gain of which is based on a study of artificial sweeteners given to rat pups. Apparently, feeding the baby rats faux sweeteners, “Made them crave more calories than animals fed real sugar.” (DeNoon, 2007). The human body, as intelligent as it is, may be seeking calories that it anticipates from a diet (no calorie) soft drink in the form of an increased appetite.
Dieters, beware. Zero-calorie poison in a can leads to more weight gain than sugar-laden soda, but your best bet is to avoid both, as the other downfalls of soda would outweigh any benefits-that is, if any benefits existed.
