Mandy Geyer Mandy Geyer

Diet Soda: Yay or Nay?

First and foremost: If we take a moment and ask ourselves, is diet soda healthy? I think the answer is pretty obvious. Just look at the ingredient list for Diet Coke: 



The sheer number of ingredients, and the number of those ingredients that aren’t something you would find in your kitchen, should be a clue that this is probably not something good for us to ingest.


However, if you google health benefits of diet soda, you’ll find SO MUCH CONFLICTING INFORMATION. I can’t stress that enough. It’s so confusing! Diet soda can help with weight loss, even better than water? Diet soda increases risk of diabetes? And that’s just 2 examples. There are thousands more conflicting articles and studies. We can all generally agree that regular soda isn’t great for you, but it gets a little more confusing when we talk about diet soda, and everyone seems pretty firm in their stance in the debate.


Before I get into the specifics though, I think everything you need to know is on the can or bottle - the ingredient list. If you read through those ingredients noted above and still think this is something that will positively impact your health, then well, I’m not sure I can convince you otherwise. But if you read through that list and think - well, maybe it’s not good, but is it that bad? Then I have some information that can help answer that question.


 First, I’ll start with that study that says drinking diet soda can help you lose weight and may be more effective that water. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see a note that the study was paid for by the American Beverage Association (whose members include Coca-Cola and Pepsi, just to name a couple) and that the authors received consulting fees from Coca-Cola. You can reach pretty much any conclusion you want from a study by manipulating the data the way you need to, and my guess is Coca-Cola was hoping for a very specific outcome from this study. This study was also published in 2016, a few years after Diet Coke sales started to decline. Maybe just coincidental timing, but curious nonetheless.


Here’s a study not funded by the soda industry, but rather by the government and no stated conflicts of interest from the authors. This one found that daily diet soda consumption was linked to a 36% greater risk of metabolic disease and 67% greater risk of type II diabetes compared to those who did not drink diet soda. Note, this was an observational study and does not necessarily imply causality, but not a great result.


Another study found that diet soda drinkers had greater reward responses to sweet tastes, suggesting that diet soda can change your brain to want sweet taste more, and make you crave more sweet treats. Not exactly what you want when trying to live a healthy life; increasing the power of your sweet tooth doesn’t usually align with improving your health.


It’s also been found that diet soda drinkers have lower quality diets than non-soda drinkers. Drinking diet soda during pregnancy has been linked to increased incidence of autism in children. A systematic literature review completed this year also found links between diet soda consumption and mental health burden, certain cancers, end state renal disease, arthritis, hip fractures, and dental erosion. Finally, diet soda has addictive propertieshttps://psychology.osu.edu/news/addictive-properties-soda-according-dr.-gary-wenk; a lovely combination of caffeine, carbonation, and sweetener, to make you want more and more.


If you’re part of the 63% of Americans who drink soda daily, or the 20% who drink diet soda daily, you may have a really hard time quitting. I get it. I used to drink Diet Coke daily sometimes. I can still remember the taste - so satisfying, even first thing in the morning. It gave me that nice caffeine jolt that I needed (looking back though, maybe I needed to examine WHY I needed so much caffeine to get going). As I noted, it’s addictive! But it’s worth it to quit. Even if everything in it is deemed safe, there’s enough evidence of potentially harmful health effects that it’s just not worth the chance. My health is more important. Have some water. Have some sparkling water. I sometimes add a splash of pomegranate juice to my sparkling water to make me feel fancy. And if that seems hard, go back and read about what it does to your body and see if maybe that changes your mind.

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