(BlackDoctor.org) — You know that soda, period, isn’t the best thing for you, but you just love it soooo much, right? So, it wouldn’t hurt to just drink diet soda, right?
Sorry, but according to new research, even diet drinks can make you fat.
During a recent meeting at the American Diabetes Association in San Diego, key experts explained that, per two new studies, diet soda can be detrimental not only to your waistline, but your overall health.
“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised” Dr. Helen Hazuda, professor of medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said in a written statement. “They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.”
Consequences such as weight gain.
For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers’ waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely.
And as waist size grows, so do health risks – including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions that tend to affect the African American community in larger numbers.
But What’s Wrong With Diet Soda?
Just how does diet soda make you fat? The other study may hold the answer. In it, researchers divided mice into two groups, one of which ate food laced with the popular sweetener aspartame. After three months, the mice eating aspartame-chow had higher blood sugar levels than the mice eating normal food. The authors said in a written statement their findings could “contribute to the associations observed between diet soda consumption and the risk of diabetes in humans.”
But how?
“Artificial sweeteners could have the effect of triggering appetite but unlike regular sugars they don’t deliver something that will squelch the appetite,” Sharon Fowler, obesity researcher at UT Health Science Center at San Diego and a co-author on both of these studies, told the Daily Mail. She also said sweeteners could inhibit brain cells that make you feel full.
So if sugar soda is no good, and diet soda isn’t either – what should we be drinking?
Dr. Hazuda told the Daily Mail, “I think prudence would dictate drinking more water.”
For some great tips on making your water more delicious, click here.
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