Can Diet Soda Hurt Weight Loss?
This is a question that seems to come up every time we get serious about weight loss. The soda drinker will start to look at the calorie count in a typical 20oz bottle of soda and will realize that the 20 minute treadmill workout is just about balanced by that one soda. Knowing that most [...]
This is a question that seems to come up every time we get serious about weight loss. The soda drinker will start to look at the calorie count in a typical 20oz bottle of soda and will realize that the 20 minute treadmill workout is just about balanced by that one soda. Knowing that most gurus say we shouldn’t drink our calories, we start to think about diet soda as a quick and easy alternative to shave calories but still get the soda fix. Some of them actually taste not too different from the real thing, and we think we’ve found a solution.
Then, we start to hear about all the negative effects of diet soda. Do they promote weight gain? Can they be more harmful that the regular soda? A quick online search leads to a spirited debate and we’re confused again.
I’m not going to give the definitive answer here, nor am I going to rehash the online debate. Just google “is diet soda bad” and go from there if you are interested. But here’s a common sense way to look at it. Do you want to drink what amounts to a carbonated chemical experiment? It’s perhaps a harsh way to look at it, but I think it’s true. Just take a look at the ingredients– water, caramel color, artificial sweetener, phosphoric acid, citric acid, potassium benzoate, natural flavor, and caffeine. So, colors, chemicals and acid dissolved in water. The body simply isn’t expecting to deal with this.
The doctors and other high-IQ types can debate the actual effects– whether getting the sweet without the calories causes your body to them crave sweets, the effect of the acid on your teeth, the long term effect of replacing some molecules in sugar with chlorine and calling it healthy, etc.. But, just a dose of common sense says this stuff can’t be good for us.
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