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2 New Studies: Diet Soda Leads to Weight Gain, Diabetes

July 2nd, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments
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Earlier this week, at a conference of the American Diabetes Association, 2 interesting studies related to diet soda were presented. Both reached similar conclusions – Not only will diet soda NOT help you lose weight, it may actually cause weight gain and diabetes!

Study #1 – Diet Soda consumption is linked with increased waistline

Hundreds of participants were followed over an average course of 10 years. A direct correlation between diet soda consumption and weight gain was established:

Diet soft drink users, as a group, experienced 70 percent greater increases in waist circumference compared with non-users. Frequent users, who said they consumed two or more diet sodas a day, experienced waist circumference increases that were 500 percent greater than those of non-users. read more from Science Daily…

Study #2 – Aspartame consumption increases risk of diabetes

This study was conducted on 2 groups of mice. The poor things were stuffed with fatty food and one group was given aspartame to boot. After 3 months, the latter group of mice showed higher levels of fasting blood glucose than the former. Elevated levels of fasting glucose are a potential early indicator of diabetes.

“These results suggest that heavy aspartame exposure might potentially directly contribute to increased blood glucose levels, and thus contribute to the associations observed between diet soda consumption and the risk of diabetes in humans…” read more from Science Daily…

Still sipping away at your Diet Sprite?

Need more evidence that drinking diet soft drinks is bad for you?

Consider this – ever since diet soft drinks were introduced into the market, obesity and diabetes rates in this country have skyrocketed.

Still need more convincing? Read this

What to do at the supermarket:

We’ve said this a hundred times and we’ll say it again. The fastest way to see some real results with weight loss is to go cold turkey on all beverages. Skip the the soft drink aisle, the juice aisle, and the diet aisle. Learn to drink water. Preferably tap. Carbonated water is OK too.

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  • Leighann of D-Mom Blog

    Type 2.

    Help us educate correctly.

    Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease with no known cause and no cure.

    Type 2 diabetes can be caused by poor diet and lack of exercise and can often be controlled by improving both.

    Type 1 diabetics cannot produce insulin & will die without it.

    Type 2 diabetics are often insulin resistant meaning they can’t properly use the insulin their body makes.

    It’s important not to lump the two types of diabetes together and only takes a few more key strokes on your behalf to help educate correctly.

    (I’m a longtime reader & often link to your posts.)

    • Anonymous

      Both types of diabetes are genetic. People without a genetic predisposition to Type II can eat all the “bad” food they want and not exercise and they won’t get diabetes. Thin, healthy people who have the wrong genes can still develop Type II. For someone claiming to want to educate, you’re spreading more falsehoods, implying that diabetes is something you can get through habits, rather than being genetic.

      • BJ

        You’re kidding right?  Type 2 diabetes has skyrocketed, not because more people are genetically predisposed all of a sudden, but precisely because of all of the “bad” overly processed food society eats these days – vegetable oils, HFCS, foods with high Omega 3′s, and Polyunsaturated fats.

      • Leighann

        I said that Type 2 “can” be caused by lifestyle. I didn’t say “always.” But Type 1 is absolutely NEVER caused by lifestyle.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Susie-Kasper/1437027124 Susie Kasper

        Wrong, Wrong, Wrong…..I have 3 different friends that developed Type 2 that have absolutely no history in their genetic background for this.  And no other family members have developed this.  For 1 it was traced back to untreated gum desease, for 1 it was being 100 pounds over weight and very poor eating and life habits, and for the other, they are still trying to determine the cause.  While myself on the other hand have a very strong history of Type 2 in my genetic background and (knock on wood) have yet to develop the desease and am in my mid 50′s.  They keep testing and don’t know for sure why I have skated thus far.

    • http://www.fooducate.com/blog Fooducate

      Thanks Leighann, for clarifying.

  • Guest

    I kicked the diet soda habit by substituting water or, during those long afternoons at work, iced tea (homemade, not sweetened).

    I now drink the occasional Diet Coke and usually put it down after a few sips, because it tastes like a glass of chemicals to me.

  • Dmg5prr

    I dont drink soft drinks or consume artificial sweeteners, and I agree with the “correlation” made in this study; However, I am not seeing proof of cause & effect. All I see here is more evidence that diet soft drink drinkers are the same type of people who make other unhealthy diet decisions.

    • http://www.fooducate.com/blog Fooducate

      not just people, mice too?

      • Dmg5prr

        Touche! True, on the elevated blood glucose levels. On the expanded waistlines-?..

  • Lisafearis

    My hubby told me that for years! Does that make him a genious??
    I kept saying: No, there are no calories in it look!” 0, 0, 0, 0 everything!
    I did away with it for over 2 years post op. Now I must confess….I like a diet pepsi once in awhile. And I try to do it caffiene free. It is obviously not good for you….there is nothing in it that makes it good…except the taste and the bubbles!
    Lisa

  • Karyn

    Besides being bad for you, diet pop just tastes disgusting.  I am a big water drinker, and I can’t believe how many people think this is remarkable.  If you want something else to drink, try tea–make it yourself, from good quality tea leaves, with a touch of honey or other real sweetener.  It will still be way less sugary than anything you buy off the shelf, and good for you to boot.  Plus green tea is supposed to be helpful in weight loss/maintenance.

    Once in a great while, I will drink natural-ingredient, naturally-sweetened (cane sugar) pop, either because I have stomach flu and that’s about all I can ingest or because I have a craving for a really good root beer. :-D  But it’s a TREAT, not a staple of my diet.

  • Michelle

    Oh, I love the lengths people will go to to hold themselves blameless and to defend their poor choices. The irrefutable fact is that diet soda (or regular soda, for that matter) does not provide ANY value or benefit to your body and most likely causes it harm. So go ahead and do whatever you like but don’t pretend you don’t know better.

  • Tracy

    I drank Diet Coke for about 25 years. I am 39. I started in my early adolescence thinking that I would be skinnier by drinking diet soda. Nope. I’ve always been heavier and always craved sweets as a result of DC. I quit cold turkey a year ago this month. I feel infinately better. No more “brain bounce” as I call it. I think so clearly now and I have lost about 10-15 lbs by drinking primarily water. Occasionally a sweet tea is good, but water tops my list.

  • Eric

    What about stevia-sweetened soft drinks, like Blue Sky Free?  Any thoughts as to better/worse? 

  • David B.

    Correlation is not causation. Here is a good article which discusses some of the issues with this study: http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-diet-soda-weight-gain-20110701,0,2598431.story?track=rss

    Note some key points: “The study wasn’t huge or broad, assessing only 474 elderly participants…” And: “The results, which haven’t been published or peer-reviewed…”

    And here’s a biggie: As Richard Mattes, a nutrition scientist at Purdue University, points
    out: Heavy people simply might choose to consume diet drinks more. Mattes has studied how artificial sweeteners affect appetite and food
    intake. He believes that many studies reporting a link between diet soda
    and weight gain are actually hitting on a behavioral phenomenon—people
    think they can eat more calories because they’ve swapped their regular
    soda for a Coke Zero. “That’s not a fault of the product itself, but it’s how people chose to
    use it,” he says. “Simply adding them to the diet does not promote
    weight gain or weight loss.””

    Not to mention: “The recent study didn’t track how many calories people consumed…”

    LOTS of issues here, WAY to early to jump to conclusions!

  • James Cooper

    The weight gain study is apparently a follow on to a previous study. In that study they made it clear that they have not proven causation, only correlation with weight gain. Further they admit that this is the result of diet questionnaires, which are not considered all that reliable. The second study on aspartame seems to be more cause for concern, but there is as yet no published paper to review on this, so their conclusions are at best an hypothesis.

  • Holly

    For those of you wondering how on earth diet sodas could cause weight gain, here’s an interesting factoid:  we have taste receptors that sense sweet tastes not just on our tongues, but also in our gut.  Why would we need taste receptors in our gut?  One thing they do is trigger hormones that induce the cells lining the intestines to express more glucose transporters — effectively increasing the amount of glucose your body can absorb.  There may be no glucose in the diet drink (or food) but if it makes your body absorb more of the glucose from the other parts of your meal, you will be taking on more calories.  One implication of this is that it does not matter what type of fake sweetener you are using — if it tastes sweet it will trigger the receptors.

    This is only one effect discovered so far, we don’t know what else the taste receptors are triggering your body to do.  Here’s one article on the topic, with a little search on google scholar you can find more:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2075289/

  • steves yok

    Overweight women want to lose more than they have won the additional weight. Most of them forget that they have gained weight over a long period and that it is impossible to leave it turned off at night.