This is piece was last updated August 2nd, 2017.
It’s 2 pm. You have a 10-minute break to grab a granola bar and make it to your next class. The only beverage options in front of you are either diet soda or coffee. You feel confident in your diet soda choice… well, not anymore.
Turns out that diet soda is an even worse idea than you think.
Just because the word “diet” is in the product’s name doesn’t mean it is good for you – advertisers lie. Yep, I said it. Mind blown right?
Even worse, a recent study carried out by the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, found that drinking a diet soda twice a day increases your risk of heart failure by 23 percent.
The study published in the British Medical Journal in November 2015 looked at over 42,000 men over the course of 12 years. It turns out drinking your diet soda instead of a regular one has just as many health risks, if not more. In fact, 509 people who took part in the study died of heart failure.
Nonetheless, you shouldn’t be crying over your diet soda just yet. Like I said before, the studied focused on men, particularly Swedish men between the ages of 45 and 79. More studies need to be done to include women, other ethnic groups and younger age groups.
Now let’s talk nutrition — diet sodas replace sugar with other artificial sweeteners. Businessmen market these drinks as the healthier alternative to regular soft drinks. Some alternative sweeteners include aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin, acesulfame-k or sucralose to name a few.
Take a minute and think. Have you ever seen someone who switches from Coke to Diet Coke to lose weight or become healthier from this change alone? No, they’re probably making other changes too, but this one really isn’t going to help.
Besides heart failure, diet soda has been linked to other issues including weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease. In April 2017, a study published in the American Heart Association journal “Stroke” found that those who drank a daily diet soda were three times more at risk for dementia and stroke.
So yes, your diet soda has a lot of bad potential. Looks like we’ll be needing a new mixer for happy hour.