Sugar-free doesn't get you off scot-free

Last night on my way home, I drove past a billboard that showed three cans of Diet Coke on a table. The caption was: The 3-Hour Meeting. The thing is, I know people who can (and do) drink a can of diet soda per hour. But if you suggest to a diet-sodaholic that six or eight diet sodas a day might be excessive, they’re likely to argue that there’s nothing wrong with drinking that much. After all, it’s got no calories. It’s practically the same as drinking water, right?

Maybe not.  Evidence is mounting that diet sodas are anything but health-neutral.  First off, diet sodas  don’t appear to help you manage your weight, which is presumably their raison-d'etre, right? Studies show that the more diet soda you drink the more likely you are to be overweight or obese.  Now, this study doesn’t show that diet soda makes you fat. It might be that people drink diet soda because they are already overweight. But it does suggest that drinking diet soda doesn’t help you get any thinner.

And there’s other research suggesting that artificial sweeteners may disrupt your brain's ability to regulate caloric intake, leading you to overeat and gain weight.  There's also some suggestion that diet sodas increase your appetite and cravings for sweets. So instead of satisfying your sweet tooth with a “harmless” calorie-free beverage, you may actually be stoking your cravings for sugar. (I wonder if that’s why so many diet soda drinkers develop what they describe as “addictions” to the beverages?) 

Secondly, diet (and regular) sodas contain phosphates, which can leech calcium out of bones. These days, most teens and young adults are drinking copious amounts of soda during the years when they need to accumulate a lifetime store of bone mass. As a result, they are much more likely to suffer from osteoporosis, and to experience the effects of thinning bones much earlier in life.

And now, research shows that those who drink one or more soda per day (whether diet or regular) are 40% more likely to develop metabolic syndrome, a collection of risk factors that put you on the fast track to heart disease and diabetes.

A harmless indulgence? It hardly seems like it. (And I haven't even mentioned the controversy over the purported toxicity of artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Equal.)

If none of this gives you second thoughts about drinking diet soda, you’re not alone. Here’s at least one writer who feels that sodas are merely the latest victims of the “food police.” 

Personally, I think I’ve seen enough to convince me that anything more than occasional soda is just not worth it. I prefer making my own fizzy drinks with seltzer and fruit juice anyway.  In fact, I just found this cool little gizmo that you can use to make selzer water at home.  It uses a big CO2 cartridge to carbonate filtered, spring or tap water. It's a little like those old-fashioned soda siphons except that one cartridge (which is about the size of a 1 liter bottle of soda) charges about 100 bottles of water and can then be exchanged for a full one, sort of like the propane tank on your gas grill. 

I just bought one for the house and we really like it. It’s cheaper than buying even store-brand seltzer, plus we’re not putting all those plastic bottles in the recycling bin every week.  It's called a Soda-Club Home Soda Maker if you want to check it out.