Diet soft drinks now proven to make you fat....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-15-2010

A huge percentage of people who drink soft drinks today, drink diet soft drinks hoping to avoid the fattening effects of the regular soft drinks.

It seems obvious and likely that something with no or close to no calories and definitely no sugar would avoid weight and fat gain.

This is NOT true! The facts are that diet soft drinks ARE fattening and look to be every bit as fattening as the regular kind.

The main reason is that they act as an appetite-stimulating drug that makes you want more sugars and need super sweet things to satisfy the urges they create.

It also doesn’t help that many people who drink diet soft drinks often keep eating other fast food such as fries and hamburger buns and junky fast food desserts and may even eat more from this effect.

The result in test after test is that over 90% of the people who drink soft drinks are fat and may even be less healthy than people who drink regular soft drinks.

That’s really bad since regular drinkers of soft drinks are reliably too fat and tend to have more high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease than people who drink none.

Recently EveryDayHealth.com that sends emails with health content for Jillian Michaels’ weight loss email list sent an email with the title,

“Is Diet Soda Making You Gain Weight?”

A doctor, Chris Iliades, MD, wrote it --

& said that virtually 60 % of Americans drink diet soda every week.

The recent research shows that these people weigh more than people who don’t!

Some of that may be caused the other way around in that people who want to weigh less who gained weight in other ways are trying to do something easy to fix it.

But, the studies show that drinking diet soda DOES make you fatter and heavier too.

Worse, it makes it even more likely you’ll develop something called, “metabolic syndrome.”

Metabolic syndrome includes increasing waist size, higher blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, lower levels of good cholesterol, high fasting blood sugar levels, AND getting gradually fatter.

Oops !! Boosting triglycerides and lowering HDL mean that you have MORE of the small particle LDL that CAUSES heart disease.

A bigger belly and waist measurement, getting fatter, high blood pressure, and too high blood sugar readings all speed up heart disease and make it worse and more likely to harm you.

That means this research strongly suggests that the very large group of people who drink diet soft drinks are causing themselves future heart problems and possibly type 2 diabetes by doing so.

And, there is an excellent chance that this is no accident.

The article points out that in research done at Purdue University, rats fed artificial sweeteners gained even more weight than rats fed too much real sugar.

This means that the fattening effects of diet sodas are likely hard wired into your biology. They are not imaginary or likely to be easily overcome.

The article then quotes a doctor who notes that these artificial sweeteners not only cause your body to crave foods with sugar, they make real sugar taste less sweet, so you need MORE of a sugar fix later to feel better. That will do it.

You WILL then eat a net of more sugary foods than you would have without the diet soda and get fatter.

Of course there are also some people who think they can get away with an extra dessert because of the calories they “saved” with the diet soft drinks.

Those people get fatter still.

The article also noted that diet colas may be a bit more addictive than regular colas since the diet ones have 34.3 % more caffeine.

The good news is that water will quench your thirst. Chilled club soda or other carbonated water with no sugars or artificial sweeteners or flavors added will give you that nice sparkly feeling. Green tea, tea, and coffee will give you caffeine if you are addicted to colas of either kind and need a new caffeine source.

And, if you drink those instead of either diet OR regular soft drinks and avoid adding sugar or artificial sweeteners yourself, you will be less fat and healthier.

In fact, if you have been drinking two or more of either kind of soft drinks every day, within a few months you have a good chance of being more than 30 pounds lighter. Virtually all of that weight will be fat, particularly if you exercise regularly. And, once you get used to it, you actually may be LESS hungry rather than more!