We all know by now that soda (aka "pop" in some areas) is one of the generally evil things you can situate in your body... the nasty chemicals, the gut-fattening high fructose corn syrup, and a numberless of health problems caused by this carbonated cocktail worshipped by those that don't treatment about their health or body.
Surprisingly, various people falsely believe that "diet" soda is in some way a good thing for losing body fat. In fact, I hear people all the time proudly state that they eat so healthy and only drink diet soda.
So let's set the record straight...
There is NOTHING even distantly healthy about drinking diet soda. In fact, I've even seen numerous studies that showed dedicated diet soda drinkers got even FATTER than their regular soda drinking counterparts.
Here's certain finding from an 8-year University of Texas study that I had read...
An excerpt from the study author:
"What didn't surprise us was that total soft drink use was coupled to overweight and obesity," Fowler tells WebMD. "What was surprising was when we looked at people only drinking diet soft drinks, their risk of obesity was even higher."
"There was a 41 percent heighten in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes every day," Fowler says.
Ok, as if we didn't already know how bad regular soda was for us, and now they're showing us studies that diet soda makes us even fatter than the already bad stuff!
There's a lot of complicating factors as to why this occurs...
One is that the artificial sweeteners in diet sodas create a negative hormonal response in the body that increases fat storing hormone production and increases cravings for more sweets and refined carbohydrates in the time period after consuming the diet drink.
Another motive is that people may unconscious think that because they are drinking a diet soda, that gives them more Latitude to eat more of everything else, hence consuming calories generally.
I've said this all along, but the bottom line is that if you're serious about your health and body, soda of any kind (and artificial sweeteners in anything for that matter!) should be avoided at all times, except for very rare occasions when you can't steer clear of them.
So what is a good substitute to diet sodas?
The best substitutes are good old water with lemon or unsweet iced teas... you have sufficiently of options with teas - green, white, black, oolong, red... be creative in making your iced teas and you'll enjoy it more. Plus you'll get a more diverse array of antioxidants.
I just added a few non-caloric sweetener stevia to my iced tea natural and I love them. I want to get my
