Cutting
calories is an expected part of your weight loss journey, and when you look at
the possible ways to reduce caloric intake, choosing diet soda seems like a
correct choice, right?
Or is it?
For years,
numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the health hazards of regular
sugary sodas: tooth decay, diabetes, and of course, weight gain. But believe it
or not, new scientific studies on the
effects of diet soda are bringing to light the exact same health hazards –
including weight gain!
While
scientists are not sure as to exactly why the body reacts to diet sodas as if
they were sugar-filled, they do have a few theories. First, there’s nothing
nutritionally redeeming or natural in diet soda. It’s a combination of
laboratory chemicals combined with water and carbonation. And if the body
doesn’t recognize what’s being ingested or doesn’t have the ability to totally
break it down to excrete it, it will store it away in fat cells. The more you
ingest a substance that it can’t break down, the more you will gain weight as
your body tries to find storage for the chemicals it doesn’t know what to do
with.
Other
scientific findings point to the disruptions between the taste buds and the
brain when it comes to diet soda. When diet sodas are ingested, they seem to
signal overeating. It works this way: your tongue receive intense messages of
sweetness when you drink diet soda. It tells your brain that it has a pretty
big incoming load of calories. So your brain prepares the rest of your body to
process the anticipated caloric intake, including releasing insulin, which
makes your cells ready to take in energy from the digested food Only with diet
soda, you don’t deliver on those calories, leaving your body with an elevated
insulin level (bad for your body) and your brain thinking there something
missing somewhere. So it will urge you to overeat later in the day to make up
for that jacked-up level of insulin you ordered earlier.
In addition,
those same scientific studies point to diet sodas as contributing to overeating
in an additional way: a dulling of the taste buds that detect sweetness,
leading to you to hunt down sweeter and sweeter things to eat and drink as you
try and satisfy your sweet tooth.
No matter
how you look at it, diets sodas don’t have a place in your weight loss journey.