Drink Diet Soda, Add Weight?

We have been conditioned to equate sweet taste with celebration, happiness, and enjoyment. As parents, we promise children candies, chocolates and cakes for agreeing to do something important, but unpleasant: be it a visit to doctor or doing home work. We call our loved ones “honey” and “sweetie”. Why so? Sugar makes us feel good: it gives us instant rush of energy and serotonin — the mood-elevating neurotransmitter. That’s why it is easy to get addicted to sugar.

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Sugar is bad enough; but zero calorie artificial sweeteners are worse still. A recent study at Purdue University, USA, shows that feeding artificial sweeteners like saccharin to rats made them crave more calories than those fed real sugar. The researchers fed rats with yoghurt sweetened with sugar/saccharin. Subsequently, it was found that the saccharin-fed mice ate more calories and gained more weight than their sugar-eating counterparts.

Let’s discuss why people who drink diet soft drinks don’t lose weight.

Sugar (sucrose) gets metabolized directly into glucose, and gets into the bloodstream, bypassing much of the digestive process. The production of insulin gets a kickstart so that the body cells can absorb the sugar. For a healthy person with a healthy metabolism, blood levels of the appetite suppressing hormone called leptin increase and satiety sets in. But with too much sugar and the consequent excess insulin, our bodies develop resistance to leptin and we can’t get satisfied. When your brain is resistant to leptin, it gets the signal that you’re starving and it slows down your metabolism and stores the blood sugar as fat. So, if you consume too much sugar, you become insulin resistant. If you’re insulin-resistant, you’re leptin resistant, and that’s a vicious cycle.

The diet drinks and low sugar food contain artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which have been proved to be toxic.  Here’s link to people reporting on several adverse reactions to diet drinks including gaining weight .

Aspartame gets broken into its toxic components – phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methanol by the liver. This energy-intensive process depletes the resources of the liver leaving it with insufficient energy for fat burning and metabolism, thus resulting in excess fat clogging it. When this happens, it is extremely difficult to lose weight.

Aspartame has been linked with cancer and thyroid disease too. The Trocho Study in Barcelona shows that the formaldehyde converted from the free methyl alcohol accumulates in the cells and damages DNA in the cells. It is particularly toxic for those with diabetes; it causes fluid retention.