You may have heard before that diet soda is actually worse for your health than regular soda, but I have serious doubts there is any evidence to back this myth up.
Diet soda has been given a bad reputation from misinformation in the nutrition space with many studies proving the usefulness of diet soda.
One example of this misinformation can be seen in a HuffPost article published on July 11, 2013 about how drinking soda might cause you to gain weight.
The article shows data from only a single study showing diet soda to have negative effects, along with several sources that do not from research journals.
Not only is this research hyperbolic in its portrayal of diet soda being bad for you, but it also portrays a false narrative about regular soda.
While there is some evidence that drinking artificial sweeteners may hurt health, that idea is missing an important factor: sugar-sweetened beverages are worse for your health.
Because sugary drinks are so hyper-palatable, or easy to overeat, this can be a problem that leads to negative health outcomes, such as type 2 diabetes, according to a Cell Metabolism research article.
Replacing sugar-sweetened beverages in your diet with low-calorie or zero-calorie sweetened beverages may aid in weight loss, according to an Ibero-American consensus published in the journal Nutrients on June 25, 2018.
Part of the reason why diet soda might work as an alternative to sugar-sweetened soda is because diet soda often has no calories, according to MedlinePlus.
The best part is that diet soda is still quite tasty.
A calorie is a unit of measurement that measures energy, according to the National Institute of Health.
The National Institute of Health also said that when the body has excess energy —or in other words, excess calories — it will store that energy in the body as adipose tissue, known colloquially as fat.
When the body is in an energy deficit, it will take the adipose tissue it stored from excess calories and use it for energy, thus creating fat loss, according to the same article from the National Institute of Health.
Because it has no calories, diet soda is something that I can incorporate into my diet without making any changes at all. If I’m trying to lose weight, it is a simple, instantaneous way to reduce daily caloric intake so I don’t have to worry about wasting calories on a drink.
Drinking artificial sweeteners could have more benefits in weight loss than drinking water, according to a randomized clinical trial in 2015 that compared drinking water to drinking artificially sweetened beverages.
The study measured the weight of 308 participants over a year, with one group drinking at least 24 fluid ounces of artificial sweeteners per day and another group drinking at least 24 fluid ounces of water per day.
At the end of the year, participants in the artificial sweetener group experienced an average weight loss of about 13.7 pounds, while participants in the water group experienced an average weight loss of about 5.4 pounds.
The study also points out that some observational studies have shown a positive correlation between drinking artificial sweeteners and weight gain, but these studies are not able to find a cause-and-effect relationship in the same way randomized control trials can.
This does not mean that you should replace water with diet soda, because water is an essential nutrient for optimal health, and there still may be data linking undesirable health effects with artificial sweeteners, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
These artificial sweeteners are what make diet soda taste good, despite having no nutritional content to support their tastiness, according to a Mar. 16, 2022 Nutrients review article.
I don’t think diet soda is the “end all, be all.”
There are probably cons to drinking diet soda, so don’t go replacing your water just yet, but these cons both have yet to be researched and have minimal effect.
One common point in the debate over artificial sweeteners on health is the artificial sweetener aspartame, according to a July 14, 2023 article from the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently classified aspartame, an artificial sweetener approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as a group 2B carcinogen, a substance with the potential to cause cancer, according to the agency’s records.
This might sound alarming, but these agents are classified as “possibly carcinogenic.” Other agents included in group 2B include pickled vegetables, bracken fern, gasoline, and occupational exposure to dry cleaning, according to the same records.
The FDA also released a statement disagreeing with the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which classified the substance as possibly carcinogenic.
The statement also said that aspartame is one of the most studied food additives, and the substance being classified as possibly carcinogenic does not mean it can actually cause cancer.
I find it highly unlikely that the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic because it may cause cancer. The more likely reason is that there is still not enough research to definitively prove that aspartame has no link to carcinogenic effects.
Another common argument against drinking artificial sweeteners is that it is detrimental to your gut health, according to a 2014 NPR article.
This claim, similar to the claim that artificial sweeteners cause cancer, has numerous studies disproving this.
Evidence does seem to suggest that drinking artificial sweeteners does not have a statistically significant effect on the gut microbiome, according to a 2021 randomized control trial published in the journal Microbiome.
Your gut microbiome is the ecosystem of different organisms living in your intestines, such as bacteria, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The randomized control trial examined the gut microbiome of mice over 10 weeks while administering high doses of saccharine, an artificial sweetener, along with another group of humans for two weeks.
After the study concluded, the researchers did not find that the gut microbiome had been significantly altered.
I have never personally experienced gut problems after drinking diet soda myself, and while this is just an anecdote, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be true.
There may be some out there who experience gut problems from drinking diet soda, but the same thing can be said with any food.
For example, there are plenty of people who can’t properly digest dairy products, and we have a name for that: “lactose intolerance.”
Why should artificial sweeteners be any different from dairy if there are only some who experience gut issues, similar to some who might experience gut issues from eating meat or vegetables?
But the myth of diet soda being bad for you has gone on for too long, and I just want to enjoy my soda in peace without hearing about how it “might” give me cancer.
Drinking diet beverages isn’t a “fitness hack,” but it is a simple solution if you have trouble curbing your sweet tooth or lowering your calorie intake if you want to lose weight.
