Are diet soft drinks bad for you?

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+select?SGWID=0-11001-6-1338721-0

[font face=Times, Serif]New York / Heidelberg, 31 January 2012
[font size=5]Are diet soft drinks bad for you?[/font]
[font size=4]New study finds potential link between daily consumption of diet soft drinks and risk of vascular events[/font]

[font size=3]Individuals who drink diet soft drinks on a daily basis may be at increased risk of suffering vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death. This is according to a new study by Hannah Gardener and her colleagues from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and at Columbia University Medical Center. However, in contrast, they found that regular soft drink consumption and a more moderate intake of diet soft drinks do not appear to be linked to a higher risk of vascular events. The research¹ appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.

…

Gardener and team examined the relationship between both diet and regular soft drink consumption and risk of stroke, myocardial infarction (or heart attack), and vascular death. Data were analyzed from 2,564 participants in the NIH-funded Northern Manhattan Study, which was designed to determine stroke incidence, risk factors and prognosis in a multi-ethnic urban population. The researchers looked at how often individuals drank soft drinks - diet and regular - and the number of vascular events that occurred over a ten-year period.

They found that those who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent more likely to have suffered a vascular event than those who drank none, after taking into account pre-existing vascular conditions such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes and high blood pressure. Light diet soft drink users, i.e. those who drank between one a month and six a week, and those who chose regular soft drinks were not more likely to suffer vascular events.

Gardener concludes: "Our results suggest a potential association between daily diet soft drink consumption and vascular outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which soft drinks may affect vascular events are unclear. There is a need for further research before any conclusions can be drawn regarding the potential health consequences of diet soft drink consumption."

…[/font][/font]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11606-011-1968-2

[handmade34]

1. Yes

[tridim]

2. That, and they make you gain weight, and they taste like crap.

Honestly I don't know why anyone drinks them.

[Warpy]

6. I use the Soda Stream mix

which uses Splenda instead of nasty Aspartame. The resulting soda is less gassy than commercial brands and tastes a lot better.

Whether they make you gain weight in the absence of other factors is moot since none of the studies asked participants whether drinking diet soda made them splurge on other foods since they'd eliminated a huge source of empty calories by not drinking sugary stuff. None of the studies has tracked overall caloric intake. And none of the studies asked whether weight gain had preceded the switch to diet soda.

In any case, I'm allergic to milk and vitamin C so my choices are limited to tea, coffee, soda and plain water. I hate coffee and I only like plain water when it's bubbly and the weather is hot so it's tea with Splenda or diet soda with Splenda.

[HockeyMom]

3. I don't drink sofa at all

It's either coffee in the morning, water in the afternoon, and wine at night (with dinner).

[Chemisse]

4. Neither do I.

I quit cold turkey nearly 20 years ago. Just coffee, occasional tea or wine, and lots of water.

[RevStPatrick]

5. I think if you have one or two a week, probably not.

I think you have two or three a day, like many people do, they probably are bad for you.
Like just about everything else...

[SheilaT]

7. No doubt in my mind.

I gave up drinking diet soft drinks about thirty years ago. I'd decided that the chemicals couldn't possibly be good for you, and switched to regular soft drinks.

Then I pretty much gave up all soft drinks nearly twenty years ago. My younger son would drink them to the exclusion of anything else, and to the exclusion of real food. So I stopped buying them. Made me angry that I had to change MY habits because of him.

And then, as time went on, I found that I really didn't miss them. Every so often, maybe once a month at most, I'll have one. And it's nice, quite a treat. Which is the way soft drinks should be.

What actually worries me the most is that so many parents have their very young children drinking the diet soft drinks, and that's been going on since my kids were little, which means around thirty years ago. In another ten or twenty years that younger generation is going to have a bunch of odd problems and no one will be able to figure out what the source is, because the consumption of diet soft drinks will be so common that they won't be able to figure it out.

Oh, and for women, diet soft drinks tend to leach calcium from the bones. No wonder so many women of a certain age now have osteoporosis. Just over two years ago I fell in my driveway and sustained a non-displaced hairline fracture of the ulna, right below the elbow. The doctor who looked at the x-rays said, somewhat admiringly, "You have no signs whatsoever of osteoporosis or any kind of bone thinning." And I was already 61. Gee, I wonder why.

[mzteris]

8. Yes

Both as a "soft drink" and as a "diet" (code word for even more artificial crap that will kill you).