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Diet soda may prompt food cravings, especially in women and people with obesity
- Ronson 5y agoNot so much the food, but I am heavily addicted to Coke Zero. I tried on Monday to quit it after a 2 week focus to prepare and I failed within 2 hours. I have previously quit nicotine for example so it's blown my mind why I can't handle stopping this simple drink.
- Apocryphon 5y agoIs it Coke Zero specifically, how do you react towards other diet sodas?
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoThe black label Coke Zero uses aspartame instead of saccharine, is strongly carbonated, and has a noticeable caffeine bite. Sorta similar to Barq's root beer, which is less flavorful than A&W and other competitors but has caffeine and was marketed with "Barq's has bite." The newer version tastes a lot more like regular coke, but to get that flavor, it seems that it is meant to be poured over ice.
- hateful 5y agoAre you getting caffeine from other sources?
- winternett 5y agoSeems like an addiction you have through mental/memory association or routine that has been created over time for you. If "Diet Coke" is still bearable for you, or even if not, try switching to that to disconnect the addiction within your brain, then perhaps it may be easier to quit. I am not a psychiatrist though, just a suggestion.
- smoldesu 5y agoTry drinking tea, caffeinated or decaffeinated. I'm not sure why, but brewing tea has helped me stave off many such addictions.
- tdeck 5y agoDo other drinks / sources of caffeine work to replace it? I know it takes a couple of weeks to get over caffeine withdrawal, during which you may feel really tired or get headaches.
- asdff 5y agoHow did you fail within two hours? Was there still some in your home or did you unconsciously walk to the store and purchase more? Getting it out of your house is key. It's important to raise the friction to act on the vice as much as possible or else you will engage in it without thinking. If its caffeine you are physically addicted to, I will say the withdrawal is probably just as bad as a nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine withdrawal seemed to hit much faster (for me it was within 15 minutes of my last hit of nicotine vs coffee I just needed it bad in the mornings), but other than that the effects of withdrawal felt the same to me between the two stimulants. In both cases, if you are able to deal with a terrible migraine headache and feeling underslept and sick and nauseous for the two weeks it takes to get through these symptoms (in my experience at least), you will have successfully quit. I have cut back my coffee to maybe 3-5 cups a week (after a long initial detox) and I haven't used or craved nicotine in years.
- sabujp 5y agocoke zero with 700 calorie per slice pizza where i end up eating 3-4 slices
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoMan, what toppings are you having on your pizza? That's an impressively calorific slice.
- sabujp 5y ago1 costco pepperoni slice is 700 calories iirc, i can't eat 4 costco slices, but i assume a greasy pizza hut slice from a large pie is close?
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoA whole personal pizza comes close, but typically the slices are under 300 calories. I haven't had a Costco pizza slice in a while, but aren't they enormous?
- twirlock 5y agoThis is the kind of thing countless people already realize. There are simple reasons to suspect this happens. But hipsters will still say "nuh uh" because they cannot tolerate the notion of useful information that doesn't come from a big shiny ostensible authority that tells them they're sophisticated.
- petecooper 5y agoI was hooked on Pepsi Max in the early 2000s. A high pressure tech support role at an antivirus vendor was the perfect environment for me to blast through a 2 litre bottle on a typical work day. That habit almost broke me physically, ended up binging and had a mini nervous breakdown within 2 years. Not recommended.
- falcor84 5y agoI would assume that the "high pressure tech support role" also had a lot to do with it
- subsubzero 5y agoyeah, stress can do terrible things to your body, affect nervous system function, cognitive impairment, major stomach issues, affect the heart and its function, and on and on..
- layer8 5y agoJust n = 1 as well, but I’ve been drinking around 3 litres of diet coke per day for the past 15-20 years and haven’t had any adverse physical effects.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThis article is nothing new, we've known this. Body sees sweet thing, releases insulin in anticipation, but there's no calories to process. And now you've just increased your insulin resistance.
- comrh 5y agoIirc aspartame hasn't been shown to increase insulin release
- icodestuff 5y agoYeah I thought we already knew this. Maybe not for sucralose specifically?
- hirundo 5y agoI've done much N=1 testing of this proposition with a blood glucose monitor, and haven't found it to be true for me. I get a spike when I drink something sweet and sugary, but not when I drink something sweetened with sucralose, aspartame, stevia, etc.
- ashtonkem 5y agoThe theory is that you’d see a drop in blood sugar after drinking something with an artificial sweetener not a spike.
- hirundo 5y agoI don't see an identifiable reaction, though perhaps some statistics can pull one out. The reaction from a sugary drink is consistent and dramatic.
- ashtonkem 5y agoI'm not entirely certain myself if artificial sweeteners cause insulin spikes, but it's worth pointing out the difference in numbers between high and low blood sugar. Normal blood sugar is what, 90-100 mg/dl or so, while the diagnostic criteria for low blood sugar starts at 70 mg/dl. Meanwhile symptoms for high blood sugar start above 200 (or even sometimes 300) mg/dl. Presumably cravings for sugary foods kicks in well above 70mg/dl too. Simply put a spike in blood sugar due to a sugary food is much, much bigger than the drop in blood sugar sufficient to trigger a change in eating habits. And that's before we consider the impact of non-insulin hormones on our behavior, such as Ghrelin, which won't show up on a blood glucose test at all.
- winternett 5y agoThe key is to only drink it during a meal, and not outside of meals perhaps then. The amount and kinds of artificial sweeteners in each drink could well be reduced and varied by manufacturers, but time and time again they choose not to, but if you look at the alternatives of water every time or drinks that are also very high in sugar on the inverse, diet drinks are a blessing for many people.
- omega3 5y agoI've managed to replace my coke zero habit very quickly with sparkling water.
- Spivak 5y agoMy dad did the same and has been relatively happy with the decision.
- vortico 5y agoThis is specifically a study for sucralose (e.g. Splenda). Most diet drinks in the US and other countries are aspartame (e.g. Equal).
- goda90 5y agoThough the mechanisms they hypothesize about might apply to other artificial sweeteners. I see sucralose in a lot of processed foods, especially ones trying to pretend to be healthy. It's a shame that it's hard to find unsweetened sliced bread in some stores.
- dhosek 5y agoI think the sugar ingredient in bread is partly to feed the yeast, but if you start looking at ingredients, you'll find sweeteners in almost all the packaged foods, from lunch meats to soup.
- ectopod 5y agoPlenty of bread is made with just flour, water, salt and yeast. Even the very cheapest own-brand sliced white loaf in my local UK supermarket has no sugar. American bread has sugar because it's cheap and Americans like it.
- teorema 5y agoFWIW, sucralose has also been linked to C diff infection. It's worth maybe pointing out that this study was based on sucralose, just because it seems this sweetener is worth tracking separately in general. I don't really consume things with artificial sweeteners but sucralose is starting to become a concern of mine (eg for my daughter).
- teorema 5y agoI should edit this by saying I was confused: sucralose does seem to affect gut microflora, but only trehalose, as far as I know, has been linked to C diff. Still think it's worth keeping track of artificial sweeteners as they're not all the same in their effects.
- hncurious 5y agoI had to go completely cold turkey for months before I was able to break away from diet soda. My #1 tip: Do not have it in the house. If it's there, your body will find its way to it and will perpetuate the habit, the addiction, the cravings.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThis is good advice for anything you crave, be it soda, food, you name it. The hardest part about losing weight for me is when my wife continues to buy junk food for herself or the kids.
- ngngngng 5y agoHave you tried lifting weights? Maintaining muscle takes a lot of calories. If you eat too much, just turn it into muscle and there won't be any left over for your body to store fat.
- hinkley 5y agoBuying stuff you know you shouldn't eat is just present you finding yet another way to screw over future you. Also serving size matters. It's cheaper 'per serving' to get the larger container, until you are honest with yourself about how big your serving is actually going to be, and how much time and energy (and possibly money) it's going to take to undo. Buying the single serving chips or the smaller cans ends up being cheaper for me, overall. A serving of fancy chips is a treat. A whole bag of them is just self-recrimination in a crinkly bag.
- shmde 5y agoI am ignorant in this topic, but why do americans seem to drink soda( pop as they call in cinema) excessively ? I live in India and flavoured soda is considered luxury item here. We just drink water with everything, unless its a festive occasion or with alcohol. What makes soda so attractive that US customers consumes it so heavily. The only points I can think of is the cheap price and concentrated sugar which is found to be addictive.
- pvarangot 5y agoWashes away the fat and caffeine helps with the digestion of heavy meals. Same reason Italians drink wine and coffee and/or smoke cigarettes. Making super heavy meals part of your _daily_ routine is hard without supplements.
- DaveExeter 5y agoExcessive soda consumption? That's me! But I drink the sugar free versions. I guess because it is cheap (~$1 for 2 litres), sweet, and fizzy.
- dxscorp 5y agoAmerican who's kicked a soda addiction -- it's super cheap, tasty, has some caffeine, and it's everywhere (gas station, convenience store, supermarket, advertisements), not to mention you have to walk by a soda fridge near the checkout lines of most retail stores. I only drank diet soda but you become so desensitized to it that water is 'boring' in comparison you don't reach for it as easily
- porb121 5y agoeveryone points to a "hunger response" or something similar with non nutritive sweeteners and then these effects don't materialize in actual outcomes: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.13020 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.13020 "Grouping by nature of comparator revealed that NNS vs placebo/no intervention and NNS vs water produced no effect." so like, there's a food craving, and then ???? you don't gain weight. who cares! maybe you eat more in the next meal, and then it's not clear this persists into a real caloric surplus.
- brodouevencode 5y agoAdipose storage is much more sophisticated than just simple excess calories.
- porb121 5y agoso how come nobody gets fatter drinking nns's vs placebo or water or no intervention
- JasonFruit 5y agoIn practice, "Do I have excess calories?" is an excellent approximation for "Am I gaining weight?"
- manmal 5y agoThe problem with this is that „excess calories“ is a moving target. Insulin and thyroid hormone levels have a say in that, too.
- renbrom446 5y ago>replacing sugar with NNS leads to weight reduction, particularly in participants with overweight/obesity under an unrestricted diet NPR repeats the same old wives tales like you would hear from the guy next to you in line at Dunkin' Donuts but in a soothing posh accent to make you think you are an intellectual.
- foxyv 5y ago
- tonymet 5y agoI’m concerned that nutrition policy has been so confusing and unable to produce healthful outcomes
- entropicgravity 5y agoAlternatively Beck's 0% is 60 cal, almost no sugar and is a decent facsimile for beer. Win win.
- c0nsumer 5y agoI really wish more 0% beer was available in the US, and at reasonable prices. I've been buying Athletic Brewing stuff lately and it's good, but at $11-$12 for a six-pack it's priced the same as mid-tier microbrews. I can buy good local micros for a few dollars less, so the NA pricing feels a bit wasteful. But I haven't been drinking alcohol lately, so... this is my choice if I want something beer-y tasting.
- rory 5y agoLuckily enough, I think we're near the beginning of a wave of alcohol-free beer coming to market in the US. Sam Adams "Just the Haze" and Brooklyn "Special Effects IPA" both came out in the past year and are pretty solid.
- c0nsumer 5y agoI'm really hoping so. I tried that Sam Adams and found it a bit meh, it was also sufficient. Weirdly, ALDI has a NA German beer that's actually pretty all right, and like $7/sixpack. I'm really looking forward to NA Guinness. There definitely are good boutique NA beers out there, they are just SO pricey.
- hinkley 5y agoTricking your body into thinking you ate sweet things does not sound like a winning strategy in the long run. I heard a speculation recently from a science vlogger, I think he was citing a paper, but as a side comment to the fact that humans have taste buds elsewhere in our bodies, that it's possible that when the artificial sweetener is in your intestines, your body makes an effort to absorb the 'sugars' that it senses, but in the process ends up absorbing some of the ambient sugar in your GI tract that otherwise would have not been captured, or used by gut microbes, throwing the whole balance off in the process. So in effect sugar free foods still have a caloric cost from a diet perspective. Then there's sugar alcohols, which are edible by bad gut microbes but not by you.
- delecti 5y ago> Tricking your body into thinking you ate sweet things does not sound like a winning strategy in the long run. What are you comparing it to though? If you're deciding between diet soda and water, then it's hard to make a health case for diet soda. But if you're deciding between diet or regular soda, then diet soda starts to look a lot better.
- hinkley 5y agoDrink the water. Look around. This whole thread is about how the tradeoff of artificial sweetener is worse than you think it is. In toto it's pretty bad in fact. There is no 'health case' for diet soda. The person who put those four words next to each other in your brain was in marketing, probably when you were still a kid. There's a hedonic treadmill with sweets. If you stop consuming processed food with refined sugar for a while, the common complaint is that they are too sweet to drink. We have to acclimate ourselves to drinking soda regularly. Can you see how screwed up that is? Artificial sweetener is trying to keep our unhealthy relationship with sweets but cut out the consequences (or rather, trade them for other consequences).
- delecti 5y agoI'm not drinking less water because I'm drinking artificially sweetened soda; I'm drinking less genuinely sweetened soda. I have no illusion that my diet soda is better than water, but that seems to be what most comparisons are between. And maybe some day I'll remove diet soda, but for now it's not competing with water; it's competing with soda, and I suspect it's at least an upgrade in that regard.
- aaron695 5y agoAn example of a anti-meme "Diet soda is good for you" If the above is true, what would be the emerging patterns in science, media and society?
- monkellipse 5y agoI don’t doubt that diet soda is terrible for you. I would however like to point out that the particular study cited had 74 participants. This seems a bit low but to me, though I realize it may not be the only study showing some similar effects. I’d love to see a larger study.
- major505 5y agoMoral of story: drink beer. Or water. Water works too.
- hinkley 5y agoFor a long time it was illegal to list calories on beer in the US, and the number of people who assume that Guinness is at the high end of caloric density rather than down near the lite beers is just astounding. I didn't believe it, and I've either told a number of people or got to back someone up when they did it. Almost nobody believes you. It's the malt I think that convinces you that this stuff must be like a beer shake.
- w0mbat 5y agoIt has been known for a while that people who switch from regular soda to diet soda (and make no other changes) do not lose weight. This is a crazy result given the calorie difference, so there must be something going on. Somehow the body is reacting badly to the dissappoinment of not getting all the promised calories that it tasted. Either triggering cravings that drive people to make up the deficit elsewhere or causing the digestive system to change gear in some way. It is now known that there are sweetness receptors in the gut, so this flow of what the body thinks is undigested sugar may make things go haywire. Anyway, it's not my field, but I find it interesting.
- stormbrew 5y agoI think it's generally true that "people who do X (and make no other changes)" do not lose weight for all values of X except some very unhealthy things, and those unhealthy things are generally followed by rebound weight gain anyways. Almost everything to do with weight loss verges on pseudo-science and the field is constantly flooded with misinformation from people peddling something. Focusing on weight loss as a goal in and of itself is thus pretty much always a road to pain anyways.
- chithanh 5y agoWorse, artificial sweeteners are used in animal farming to make animals gain more weight. This is due to a combination of factors, both increasing appetite as well as feed efficiency.
- manmal 5y agoOne of the reasons seems to be insulin levels: https://www.mentalfoodchain.com/aspartame/ https://www.mentalfoodchain.com/aspartame/
- iamricks 5y agoJust want to add this here, artificial sweeteners are a blessing, specially for people with slower metabolisms. Food in the US is loaded with sugars, its nice to have a way to minimize consumption while satisfying cravings. You cannot argue that being obese is better than consuming artificial sweeteners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
- manmal 5y agoAspartame is not without issues: https://www.mentalfoodchain.com/aspartame/ https://www.mentalfoodchain.com/aspartame/ Allulose looks promising and tastes like real sugar (I‘ve tried it), hope it will be used more widely.
- colechristensen 5y agoThe point of the article is that artificial sweeteners have been shown to cause cravings and make changes to metabolism. They may be causing obesity instead of helping people avoid it.
- turtlebits 5y agoIf you want to cut sugar, but want something sweet, stay away from sucralose, splenda, aspartame. Some good alternatives are stevia, monkfruit, and the sugar alcohols (xylitol, erythritol, etc). I don't especially like the taste of stevia, but stevia + monkfruit blends aren't so bad.
- manmal 5y agoAllulose tastes like real sugar. Unfortunately it’s quite expensive and not widely studied. It’s available in the US, but not (yet) in the EU.
- hinkley 5y agoSugar alcohols, if overdone, can screw up your GI tract. I keep a bowl of fruit in the house at all times, and it's time to go to the store when it's getting low. I make it easier for myself to get some fiber with my sugar than to make myself something sweet. It's not enough on its own, but it sure helps.
- NathanielK 5y agoDo you have a single fact to back that up?
- kingrazor 5y agoI drank soda throughout my childhood and really ramped up how much I drank when I got into college and finally had a bit of disposable income. At a certain point I was easily drinking a gallon per day. The thing that finally got me to stop was that I started getting throat ulcers every time I drank it. I'd been getting them for years up to that point, but much more sporadically. Once I stopped drinking soda, no more throat ulcers. When I need a carbonation fix I go for seltzer water now.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago> The "diet" in diet drinks may be a false promise for some soda lovers. Now that's a surprise! Seriously - okay if you like the aspartame taste of your diet coke, go ahead. But if you actually think diet coke is "healthy" in any meaningful way - then I'm sorry, nobody can help you!
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