I can tell you from personal experience, losing weight is serious business. We look for all the breaks we can get when trying to shed a few (or more than a few). One of the crutches I leaned on was diet soda. I had a particular fondness for Coke Zero and Diet Dr. Pepper. That sweet, fizzy nectar would calm the craving for sweets.
Over the past couple years, however, it’s become harder to shed those unwanted pounds, even if I curbed my carbs to a level I knew would drop my insulin level enough to cause weight loss. Not sure what insulin has to do with weight loss? Click here. Once I cut out the diet soda, weight loss resumed at the expected rate. I had a sneaking suspicion it was the culprit, so I did a little digging.
A study in Diabetes Care from 2009 examined how diet soda influenced the risk of metabolic syndrome (aka syndrome X) and Type II diabetes. The skinny is, if you’ll pardon the pun, diet soda consumption was associated with a 36% greater risk of metabolic syndrome and a 67% greater risk of Type II diabetes vs. those who didn’t consume diet soda. Those are significant numbers! While this study examined diet soda specifically, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume use of any artificially sweetened product will probably cause the same issues.
What it boils down to is that when the taste buds tell the brain, “Hey, we just ate something sweet,” whether it’s sugar or an artificial sweetener, the brain tells the pancreas, “Time to squirt some insulin into the blood stream to handle the sugar.” Exposure to elevated insulin levels over a prolonged period eventually causes cells to become desensitized or resistant to insulin. The effects are pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and eventually, Type II diabetes.
Still crave the crispness of soda, but don’t want to increase your risk of diabetes? There are many varieties of non-caloric flavored club sodas and sparking waters that contain no artificial sweeteners whatsoever. They’re quite satisfying and may help get you off the diet soda!
Nettleton JA, Lutsey FL, et al. Diet soda intake and the risk of incident metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Diabetes Care 2009 Apr 32(4); 688-94.