Bubble trouble
When taken at face value, diet soda seems like a health-conscious choice. It saves you the 140-plus calories you'd find in a sugary soft drink while still satisfying your urge for something sweet with artificial sweeteners like aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose. But there's more to this chemical cocktail than meets the eye.
It confuses your body
Artificial sweeteners have more intense flavor than real sugar, so over time products like diet soda dull our senses to naturally sweet foods like fruit. Even more troubling, these sugar stand-ins have been shown to have the same effect on your body as sugar. Artificial sweeteners trigger insulin, which sends your body into fat storage mode and leads to weight gain.
It could lead to weight gain, not weight loss
Diet soda is calorie-free, but it won't necessarily help you lose weight. Researchers found that over the course of about a decade, diet soda drinkers in America had a 70 percent greater increase in waist circumference compared with non-drinkers. And get this: participants who slurped down two or more sodas a day experienced a 500% greater increase. The way artificial sweeteners confuse the body may play a part, but another reason might be psychological. When you know you're not consuming any liquid calories, it might be easier to justify that extra slice of pizza, more cheese on your burger or even that decadent dessert.
It's associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes
Drinking one diet soda a day was associated with a 36 percent increased risk of metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Metabolic syndrome describes a cluster of conditions (including high blood pressure, elevated glucose levels, raised cholesterol, and large waist circumference) that put people at high risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
It has no nutritional value
When you drink diet soda, you're not taking in any calories”but you're also not swallowing anything that does your body any good, either. The best no-calorie beverage - plain old water. Water is essential for many of our bodily processes, so replacing it with diet soda is a negative thing.
Its sweetener is linked to headaches
Early studies on aspartame and anecdotal evidence suggests that this artificial sweetener may trigger headaches in some people.
It'll ruin your smile over time
Diet sodas are high in acid content, particularly phosphoric acid and citric acids. When you drink diet soda “teeth are swimming in acid.” Instead of cavities developing in spots of high bacterial concentration, teeth are eroded across their whole surface. This is also the case for sports drinks, which cause enamel hardness to decrease by atleast 30 percent.
It makes drinking more dangerous
Using diet soda as a low-calorie cocktail mixer has the dangerous effect of getting you drunk faster than sugar-sweetened beverages, according to research. The study revealed that participants who consumed cocktails mixed with diet drinks had a higher breath alcohol concentration than those who drank alcohol blended with sugared beverages. The researchers believe this is because our bloodstream is able to absorb artificial sweetener more quickly than sugar.
It may be bad for your bones
Women over 60 are already at a greater risk for osteoporosis than men, and researchers found that drinking soda, including diet soda, compounds the problem. They discovered that female cola drinkers had nearly 4 percent lower bone mineral density in their hips than women who didn't drink soda. The research even controlled for the participants' calcium and vitamin D intake. Additionally, a 2006 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that cola intake (all kinds, not just diet) was associated with low bone-mineral density in women.
