I love Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. Sometimes when I felt hungry, a glass of diet soda made me feel more full than several glasses of water. I enjoyed the taste of different flavors: cherry, vanilla, and now lime. Earlier, I read a connection between drinking soda and gaining even more weight that alarmed me. Could it be all the sodium in soda? The study seemed to think not -- it seemed to have something to do with triggering a hunger response.
Eh, I thought, that doesn't happen to me. Until we hit a tight financial patch, I continued to drink a lot of diet soda. For the last week or so, though, I've restricted myself to water and gradually seem to be losing the craving for soda.
Today, there was another article about diet soda and gaining weight. This was more ominous to me and I think I will have to give up my beloved Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. According to this article, researchers are linking a sweetner used in diet drinks to replace sugar with messing with your body's metabolism. The sweetner is fructose and what might be happening is that it causes your body to store more fat. Geez, that's the last thing a person wanting to lose weight needs!
To prove it, scientists conducted a test with mice, all beginning at about the same weight. They were split into groups: some were given all the water they wanted, some were given a diet drink, some all the water they wanted flavored with sucrose (regular sugar) and some all they wanted flavored with fructose.
The mice on the fructose didn't take in as much calories. I guess they felt 'full'. Still, the scientists saw that they gained a lot more body fat over the weeks than the other groups did.
The other new tidbit of information I learned from the article is that in the last 30 years, soda manufacturers have switched over from using sucrose to fructose. Now, I don't know why they did that. The studies show, though, that soda drinking Americans have been gaining more and more weight ever since.
Is there fructose in diet soda? I don't know ... but I think it would be better to stay away from it until I find out!
About Me
- Irishcoda
- happily remarried widow with 3 kids from my first marriage, 2 from my new marriage, 8 grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren. I have been blessed to have had 2 great loves in my life. I have had another blessing too: I had bariatric surgery (a duodenal switch) and that has saved my life!
Go Pink For October
3 comments:
No fructose in a diet soda. And there are a lot of issues with the mice study referenced. There is a lot of evidence that the human body treats all sugars the same. High fructose corn syrup is made up of the two simple sugars glucose and fructose and differs only slightly from table sugar.
No, there are no fructose in diet coke (or sprite zero for that matter). The sweetener is Aspartame and Acesulfame-K...
No fructose and very low sodium. Diet Coke feeds my caffiene addiction. I think I'll stick with it for a while longer.
Blogging my weight loss attempt here.
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