They’re called diet drinks, but they increase your waistline

For many people, a meal at any time of the day isn’t complete until they take their so-called diet drink. For such people, they equate diet drinks with water and actually substitute them for water!


Yet, nutritionists are warning that if you want to maintain healthy weight, you must stay off diet drinks and drink water instead. Why is this so? Let experts talk.

According to a new study, diet soda is doing even more harm than you can ever imagine, and it could make nonsense of all your efforts at losing unwieldy weight and maintaining healthy shape.

Of course, staying in shape goes beyond the good feelings we have when people compliment us for our slim build. Rather, maintaining healthy weight has a lot of advantages for our overall wellbeing, and can even make a lot of difference between whether we develop certain diseases or not.

Back to the research report. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society reveals that “people who regularly drank diet soda over a nine-year period packed on almost three times the belly fat of those who skipped the drink.”

Even when people don’t smoke, and though they don’t have diabetes, they still develop abdominal weight gain because they regularly feast on diet soda, the scientists note. Yet, a large abdomen has been associated with the possibility of developing Type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease (a class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels such as stroke, ischemic heart disease, blood vessel diseases, heart failure, etc.) and inflammation, the researchers warn.

The researchers express amazement that though diet soda is touted as having zero calories, drinking it on a regular basis has been known to contribute to major weight gain.

The researchers offer an explanation for that: “Artificial sweeteners are sweeter than sugar without any calories. So, your body thinks it is getting a major calorie boost, but then it is subsequently left empty, making you reach for other sweet and high-calorie foods to fill the void.”

Nutritionist, Dr. Remi Omotunde, says there’s no how diet soda can help you lose weight because it is in the same class as other carbonated drinks that we have all over the place.

Omotunde warns, “Instead of sugar, they are sweetened with artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin, acesulfame-k or sucralose.”

He notes that these diet drinks actually increase people’s risks for metabolic syndrome.

“Metabolic syndrome is a group of risk factors for disease that often occur together and raise your risk of diabetes, stroke and heart disease. It is technically defined as having at least three of the following: abdominal obesity (belly fat), high fasting glucose, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol and elevated blood pressure,” Omotunde says.

Indeed, another study published in the journal Circulation warns that drinking artificially sweetened beverages was associated with a 34 per cent greater risk of developing the metabolic syndrome!

Again, experts at the online portal, health.com, note that diet drinks have the tendency to “confuse your body.” Can you beat that?

They note, “Artificial sweeteners have more intense flavour than real sugar; so over time, products like diet soda dull our senses to naturally sweet foods like fruit. Even more troubling, these sugar substitutes have been shown to have the same effects on your body as sugar.”

Worse still, Omotunde says, diet drinks have no nutritional value, hence the need to have a rethink before you assault your body with them.

“When you take diet drinks, you’re not taking in any calories – but you’re also not swallowing something that does your body any good, either. The best beverage remains the plain old water,” he concludes.

Needless to say, water is essential for many of our bodily processes, and replacing it with diet drink is daring, health-wise.

Omotunde explains, “Roughly 60 percent of the human body is made of water. Consequently, drinking enough water maintains the body’s fluid balance, as it helps transport nutrients in the body, regulate body temperature, digest food, and a lot more.”

He adds that our kidneys process large volumes of blood daily, in the process of which waste is sifted and urine is transported to the bladder. “Kidneys need enough fluids to clear away what we don’t need in the body, hence the need for enough quantity of water to help these organs do their jobs effectively. You can achieve that with diet drinks,” he enthuses.

Experts even warn that the artificial sweeteners in diet drinks, such as aspartame, may trigger headaches in some people. So, if you experience constant headache, especially after taking your favourite diet drinks, watch it; as the beverage may be the culprit.

Worse still, Omotunde contends, some people use diet drinks to mix liquor drinks. He warns that using diet drinks as a low-calorie cocktail mixer has the dangerous effect of making you drunk faster than if you had used its equally bad substitute – the sugar-sweetened beverages such as soft drinks. Scientists say this is because the bloodstream is able to absorb artificial sweeteners a lot faster than it does other sugars.

And for older adults who are already prone to losing bone minerals due to ageing, Omotunde counsels that it may expose them to lower bone mineral density – a situation that contributes hugely to osteoporosis.

So, while you may have a bottle of your favourite drinks – diet or not – once in a while, you’d do yourself a world of good by drinking more water, especially after meals.