How diet soft drinks make you fat....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-29-2010

One way we posted on two weeks ago on Tuesday, 6-15-2010 is that consuming them not only acts as a potent appetite increasing drug for the effects promised but not delivered by the taste, they stimulate your appetite for the very foods, sugary and high glycemic that make you fat.

And, this one is basic to mammalian biology.

Some people can override the effects but diet soft drinks make staying trim or losing excess fat without getting hungry enough to cause you grief MUCH harder.

But if you think that’s bad, wait until you learn the information I’ve gotten just since I did that post!

Drinking diet soft drinks and the use of artificial sweeteners (and even some natural ones with no calories perhaps) also LOWER your metabolism.

That means that those who consume these things, particularly if they do it many times a week, wind up eating MORE fattening, foods with real sugars than those who do not. And, IN ADDITION to that, they burn less calories too!

Guess what? More calories in and less calories out leaves a surplus that you wear as excess fat.

Dr Mark Hyman sent me the email that contained this news.

Then today, Dr Al Sears sent an email also saying to avoid drinking diet soft drinks because they make you fat.

He began with this:

“Dr Al Sears on 6-29-2010

People are still surprised to learn diet sodas don’t give you what they promise. You may drink them because they have no calories. But diet sodas don’t help you drop weight. They make you fat instead. And you can get hooked on them.

I came across an article in JAMA about just how addicting those diet soft drinks are. When you drink them, changes take place in your brain that make you behave differently.1

Your self-control goes out the window. Your body actually becomes addicted to the unnatural sweetness like it’s a drug.

In one study, animals had the choice between cocaine and saccharin. Ninety four percent chose saccharin – even if they were already addicted to the cocaine.2

Here are his two references:

“1 Ludwig, D. “Artificially Sweetened Beverages.” JAMA, 2009 Dec; 302(22):2477-2478.
2 Lenoir, M., Serre, F., Cantin, L., Ahmed, S., “Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward.” PLoS ONE. 2007; 2(8): e698.”

And, since diet soft drinks have a bit more caffeine than regular that can be addicting to some degree as well.

People have more mental resources than mice and rats, so they can override this addicting effect.

So there you have it.

People willingly buy and drink diet soft drinks because they assume they will become less fat.

In doing so, they unintentionally take a drug that makes them much hungrier for sweet and high glycemic foods, the very foods they should minimize to get and stay free of excess fat.

They also unintentionally take a drug that slows their metabolism which also helps them get fatter.

They then get the direct reverse of the effect they intended!

Instead of being less fat, they gradually become MORE fat than they would have drinking regular soft drinks.

And, since more than two regular soft drinks a MONTH begins to make you too fat, those who drink diet soft drinks many times a week tend to be among our fattest people.

Yikes !!

But there’s more! Since now, regular and diet soft drinks are available virtually everywhere and are quite cheap to buy, and diet soft drinks are addictive, it can be a challenge for some people to give them up.

This is very bad.

But there’s more yet!

On doctor I noted in my 6-15 post said that 60 % of Americans drink diet soda every week.

That means that diet soft drinks are one of our worst and most widespread health threats. They may add more to our national health costs than even cigarettes do.

The medical costs of the excess fat that people have today that they did NOT have 60 years ago, are in the billions of dollars a year.

We already knew that drinking regular soft drinks and eating too many sugary treats and too many treats and snacks made from refined grains was making people too fat. Now it seems that 60% of the population is ingesting something that multiplies this effect.

So, the people who are considering taxing regular soft drinks by enough to double their prices should also consider both doubling the price of diet soft drinks by taxing them AND require a warning of their actual effects on a label on every diet soft drink!

But what if you have been drinking diet soft drinks and are not sure how to stop doing so?

My take has been to simply stop cold and only drink things without these dreadful effects such as soda water, water, tea or green tea with no added milk or sugar, etc, or black coffee or coffee with 1% lowfat milk.

Today, Al Sears had another idea. People who have been drinking regular soft drinks and even more so those who have been drinking diet soft drinks crave sweet drinks. So, in addition to beginning to learn to like the drinks I list and drinking them, he suggests making your own drinks by blending real fruit with a blender or very strong blender.

This is enough work that you likely won’t overdo the number of drinks a day and you get some real nutrition and even some fiber in addition to your sweetness fix.

(The VitaMix blender is one that will blend in the fiber for you. That reduces the glycemic index and increases the ability of your blended fruit drink to reduce your hunger. It also makes the clean up easier since you don’t have to toss the left over fiber.)

Oranges and bananas are sweet while berries are not as sweet but have more fiber and nutrition. My suggestion is to try blends of orange or banana with a berry such as blueberries.

And, my favorites are tea, green tea, and coffee since they provide enough caffeine to boost mental performance and are themselves a bit addicting. So I think they may also be particularly helpful substitutes for diet soft drinks for many people.