Sugar Free Means Safe, Right?
A lot of people trying to lose weight often switch to diet drinks. It seems like a good idea, right, all of this (almost-as-good) deliciousness and zero calories? Buy me a mountain of this stuff, bag it up!
The problem with this is the same thing as the ads on the internet that say “free ipad! just enter your shipping information!!”—if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
Not me though. I’m just as cool as I seem.I bet that not one of us put in their shipping information and then went out and waited on the porch for the postman to deliver our shiny new iPad so they could play Angry Birds into oblivion.Then why do some of us still believe that diet drinks are still going to ‘help’ us lose weight? If you’re still clinging to that bandwagon, please, please step off of it for just a minute and make a totally informed decision before you guzzle down that Pepsi Max.
1. Most diet drinks are sweetened with aspartame. This includes Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi. Coke Zero, Pepsi Max, and Sugar-Free Red Bull. The problem is that aspartame is “considered by many health experts to be one of the most dangerous food additives in existence.” (-this website)
If that terrifying quote didn’t already convince you, here’s some other stuff:
1. It breaks down into formaldehyde [which is what labs use to preserve the dead rats you dissect in Bio.]
2. Aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious including seizures and death. A few of the 90 different documented symptoms listed in the report as being caused by aspartame include:
Headaches/migraines, dizziness, seizures, nausea, numbness, muscle spasms, weight gain, rashes, depression, fatigue, irritability, tachycardia, insomnia, vision problems, hearing loss, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, anxiety attacks, slurred speech, loss of taste, worsening of menstrual cramps, tinnitus, vertigo, memory loss, and joint pain.
3. There’s more info on just how nasty it is here, here and here.
2. Even if it isn’t sweetened with aspartame, there’s a good chance that what’s in there isn’t much better. The problem with artificial sweeteners is that they’re just that—artificial. Your grandma and great great great grandma and all your other ancestors haven’t been digesting this stuff for hundreds of years—so you weren’t born with the tools to digest it properly. Your body doesn’t know what to do with it—is it a pill? A drug? Food? It has to categorize it somehow, and it just doesn’t really know how to.
3. Even if it doesn’t know how to categorize it, it does know that sweet means sugar. Your brain recognizes that you ate something sweet and gets excited—sugar is a really quick and easy form of energy! Now, of course, sugar spikes aren’t healthy either, but still, your body starts buzzing and getting ready to deal with all the extra energy it’s supposed to get. Unfortunately, artificial sugar doesn’t deliver, and then you experience a drop in blood sugar and energy level, so you feel drowsier, not as sharp and responsive, not as ready to take on the day.
THEN your body gets a little peeved that the sugar it was promised didn’t show up, so you crave real sugar. You’re going to want sweet stuff way more than you would have if you would have just skipped the diet drink.
4. You think you’re doing your body a favor when you drink diet drinks. No sugar! Zero calories! What a treat! You think you’re being healthy, so you’re more likely to treat yourself other times during the day because the soda wasn’t a treat, it was a health drink! It was like drinking water! Nope. Actually, people that drink diet soda are more likely to be overweight than those that drink the real stuff.
If drinking diet drinks is a huge part of your day, it can be really hard to give it up. You’re not going to be able to just cut them out completely.
1. Try drinking less soda, but drink the real stuff. And stop thinking “ohmygod the sugar and the calories!” That will actually help your case: you’ll enjoy it more, you’ll relish it, it will be a treat. I very rarely drink soda, but a few months ago when I was really craving it, I bought real coke in one of those adorable little glass bottles and thought it was New Year’s Eve or something. It was pretty glorious, and because I treated it like the luxury that it was, I don’t want to do that every day.
2. Replace it with something else. Real no-sugar, no fake-stuff added juice, water, tea, something. I drink La Croix Sparkling Water like it’s going out of style—it’s carbonated just like pop, and their grapefruit flavor is to die for. I feel like I’m drinking soda, but it’s 100% natural and calorie free.
Here’s more articles on the subject written by real, degree-holding, labcoat-wearing professionals:
Side Effects of Aspartame
Dangers of Zero Calorie Soda
Dangers of Splenda
Aspartame
Aspartame’s Hidden Dangers
Nobody ever listens to me when I tell them not to drink diet drinks.
(via healthylivingforyou)
