Diet Soda Makes You Fat?

[drtbear1967]

Researchers in Texas once reported that diet sodas made people fat, saying that every can of soda you drink increases your chance of being fat by 41%. They had several theories. First, they said that exposure to sweetness (in artificially sweetened drinks) might increase the psychological desire for sweetness. Second, they figured that people, upon feeling all proud about having banked some calories, would then overcompensate by eating an entire Bundt cake. Others thought that the artificial sweeteners, despite lacking any calories, might have an insulinogenic response and cause people to physically crave more sugar. All their guesses seemed plausible. Too bad they were all wrong.
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A 2014 study compared diet drinks to sugar-sweetened drinks and found pretty much the opposite of the Texas study – people who drank diet sodas lost more weight than the sugar drinkers. Of course, there was a huge difference in the amount of calories ingested. So it could be said that the calorie deficit was so great that it overshadowed all those hypothetical psychological/physiological cravings theorized by the Texas group. Ok, so let's look at another study. Peters did a one-year study comparing the effects of a group that drank diet sodas to a group that drank water. The group that drank diet drinks lost more weight during the 12-week period. They also had greater reductions in waist size than the water group. Why didn't the water drinkers lose as much weight as the diet-soda drinkers? It must be that people who drank water ended up jonesing for sweetness. In other words, water drinkers felt hungrier and they often succumbed to that hunger, which is the opposite of the effect theorized by the Texas group.
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Just recently, another researcher took a look at all the studies comparing sugar-free soft drinks to sweetened drinks and all the arguments, pro and con, and concluded that the calorie reduction you get from drinking diet drinks is more important than any of the theories about how diet drinks could supposedly make you ingest more calories. In short, diet soda doesn’t make you fat.

 

[pgb]

good to know, i just don't like diet sodas. guess it's a good thing i don't drink much soda anyway.
when i was doing some work putting a major roof on, i drank more soda and did notice the increase
caused more belly fat, probably everywhere, but noticeably the midsection.

 

[yellow snow]

Here we go again another contradictory study. Is it the soda that is making people fat or what they eat? Can we blame artifical sweeteners as the root cause??...................ok ok I have one, I am going to come to the conclusion that if you breath oxygen in to your lungs you will gain weight!! So oxygen is the smoking gun or is it??

 

[BigZ]

While I don't think diet sodas increase fat, I also think the artificial sweeteners are bad for the body. I'm waiting for the soda industry to pick up natural alternatives like the rare sugar allulose which the body absorbs but doesn't metabolize before I pick up a diet drink.

 

[yellow snow]

While I don't think diet sodas increase fat, I also think the artificial sweeteners are bad for the body. I'm waiting for the soda industry to pick up natural alternatives like the rare sugar allulose which the body absorbs but doesn't metabolize before I pick up a diet drink.

I am always a little curious what these new sugars do in the body and what metabolic pathways they may inadevertanly "turn on" or what happens when it gets heated to a certain level. ( cans in a truck in the arizona desert in August)

I get plenty of artifical sweeteners due to the amount of protien shakes I ingest. As I get older and crankier ( leary) I try to eat real food over engineered food as a general rule. I know chicken breast doesn't tast nearly as good as cotton candy blast, but we all know it is a better source of protien that our body craves!!