Diet Soft Drinks: Healthier?

First off, the proper term is actually soft drink. Alcoholic beverages were historically named hard, so the obvious choice for this new bubbly beverage was soft. Soda is a shortened form of soda water, which itself was a simplified way of referring to the sodium carbonate that was once used. Pop was used to describe corked soft drinks (the cork popped when opened). Both terms just grew into use as a generic term for the same thing. That said, I still call it pop, merely because that's what I've called it my entire life.

In my articles about artificial sweeteners, I mentioned that diet pop contains aspartame and sometimes sucralose, which are both bad. This statement appears to contradict the 'proven' fact that diet soft drinks lead to weight loss. The first thing I'd like to point out is the people you see drinking diet soft drinks. As a general rule, the people drinking diet pops are the unhealthy, obese people. You might say that those people are drinking diet because they need to be healthier or lose weight, but what if it's the other way around? What if they are overweight and unhealthy because they are drinking diet?

The brain is wired up in a way so that when it consumes something extremely fatty or sweet, it prepares the body to receive and absorb a large amount of calories. But since artificial sweeteners lack the calories present in regular sugar, the body is prepared for no reason. It basically then whines at your brain that it isn't receiving the calories it's expecting. This causes a craving for more sugars or fats. You then eat more and more food to try and satisfy this craving. And when the body absorbs more food then it needs (remember, actual hunger didn't start the cycle, drinking diet pop did), it stores the extras in fats. This fat builds up, which leads to obesity and even diabetes. Aspartame and sucralose in particular also cause the body to store more nutrience than normal in fat, due to that whole issue where the two substances act as a neurotoxin.

So why do people seem to lose weight when they drink diet soft drinks? Let's say that Tim wants to lose fifty pounds. He stops eating fast food and switches to a diet that is based around whole, natural foods. He becomes more active and hits the gym regularly. He also switches from regular pop to diet. Now, let us also say that Tim's friend Bill also wants to lose fifty pounds. However, the only thing Bill does is to switch to diet soft drinks. Who is more likely to reach their goal? Probably not Bill.

Note that I am not saying that regular soft drinks are much better; they just aren't worse. More on that next week.