We need to work on addiction to too much diet soda/pop
Posted By RichC on May 1, 2024
Both my wife and I drink too many carbonated beverages. For me it is usually Diet Mountain Dew and for Brenda it has always been Diet Pepsi. I scaled bad several times in my life, but ended up right back in the habit of 3+ cans everyday. Brenda seems to be able to turn it off when needed (pregnancies and medical procedures), but hasn’t really considered it a bad or overly harmful habit — although it has most recently become a financial cost (inflation). FYI, she drinks more than 3 per day!
Over the years, we’ve read article after article on all the “bads” associated with carbonated soft drinks, but have started to send a few articles back and forth to each other in hoping to reduce the number of cans per day we consume. Here’s one Harvard Health article of interest:
Zero weight loss from zero calorie drinks? Say it ain’t so
… If you’re drinking two 12-ounce cans of regular Coke each day, you could eliminate 280 “empty” (non-nutritive) calories by switching to a zero-calorie alternative. Over a month, that’s 8,400 fewer calories, enough to lose almost two and a half pounds. So, what’s the catch?
One worry is that artificially sweetened diet sodas may create a craving for sweet, high-calorie foods. So, even as calorie counts drops from zero-calorie sodas, consumption of other foods and drinks might add back even more. In rodent studies, at least one artificial sweetener (aspartame) has been found to damage a part of the brain that tells the animal when to stop eating.
