Dr. Terry Simpson explains the dangers of artificial sweeteners in diet soda
There are so many diet sodas and diet drinks out there it's amazing. My patients are always saying to me, "It's okay to drink soda because I don't drink the sugared colas or the sugared sodas I drink diet." My answer is it's not okay. There are a bunch of reasons for that answer. Let's go through a couple of them. Number one - artificial sweeteners. Now there is a lot of misinformation about artificial sweeteners so let's get some of that out in the open. The first artificial sweetener in the United States was the cyclamates (sodium cyclamate). You can't get it here anymore because it was found to cause cancer in rats. Good way to get rid of rats, but the sweetener was shown to cause cancer in people. Then they came out with some other ones - Saccharin which you're familiar with and most people didn't like the taste. The next one to come out was Equal (aspartame) and there was a ridiculous rumor that it was developed as an ant poison. It wasn't - it was developed as a sweetener. Finally, Splenda was introduced.
Here is the problem with artificial sweeteners and drinks. When a good study was looking at over 2,500 people they found that there was an increase in heart disease and strokes among people who drank at least one artificially sweetened soda a day - 60%, that's a lot. The second thing is this, the sweetness that is in the artificially sweetened drinks is far sweeter than sugar. When it's far sweeter than sugar your body wants to balance it out. So when you start looking at people who drink diet sodas they're heavy. The reason they're heavy is not because they stopped drinking the regular soda and went to diet soda. It's because the extra sweetness stimulated their appetite and they want more to balance off that sweetness. So what's the best thing to drink? Not diet drinks, but simple water. It's easy, it's free, and it doesn't contain stuff that's going to cause you problems later on. I'm Doctor Simpson and that's your doctor's orders.
