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Sorry, soda lovers - even diet drinks can make you fat.

Health Study: Diet Soda Makes You Fat

CBS

Sorry, soda lovers – even diet drinks can make you fat.

“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised” Dr. Helen Hazuda, professor of medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said in a written statement. “They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.

Consequences like weight gain.

For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers’ waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely.

And as waist size grows, so do health risks – including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions.

Just how does diet soda make you fat? The other study may hold the answer. In it, researchers divided mice into two groups, one of which ate food laced with the popular sweetener aspartame. After three months, the mice eating aspartame-chow had higher blood sugar levels than the mice eating normal food. The authors said in a written statement their findings could ”contribute to the associations observed between diet soda consumption and the risk of diabetes in humans.“

But how?

”Artificial sweeteners could have the effect of triggering appetite but unlike regular sugars they don’t deliver something that will squelch the appetite,“ Sharon Fowler, obesity researcher at UT Health Science Center at San Diego and a co-author on both of these studies, told the Daily Mail. She also said sweeteners could inhibit brain cells that make you feel full.

So if sugar soda is no good, and diet soda isn’t either – what should we be drinking?

Dr. Hazuda told the Daily Mail, ”I think prudence would dictate drinking water.”

5 Comments

  • A Believer

    I drank only diet soda/tea for the last two years, and recently quit. I lost 5 lbs the first week, with no extra effort!

  • skinny now

    It’s true! I tried losing weight while drinking diet soda but just kept gaining. Heard about this and gave it up and lost 60 lbs.! It’s poison!

  • walla

    well, i have a dear brother in law who is a diet coke addict and somehow gets to be
    just skin and bone…… go figa!!!!!!!!!!

  • Shimon

    It’s so true what their writing here. I was dieting and exercising daily even went to gym twice a a week. i thought diet coke was helping me but only gained.. As soon as I quit the soda pop i was on the fast track and lost 90 pnds baruch hashem!