Shebudgets
Diet doesn’t mean healthy!
Ahhh…the D word. Doesn’t eating or drinking something that starts with “diet” just make you feel healthier or at least health conscious? Sure it does, but only mentally. In many ways, diet products are simply substituting some ingredient with another in an effort to expand market reach and increase profits, be it for taste or perceived health benefits.
One thing is certain, soda manufactures have never claimed their diet products to be healthy and that should be a sign in of itself. Here are six compelling reasons to ban diet soda, if not all soda, from your “diet” all together.
Sweet Cravings
According to Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP, “…by offering our tastes buds something that seems sweet, and seems to signal other parts of our bodies that glucose sugars are on the way, we set ourselves up for cravings — to which we eventually and often unknowingly, give in. In other words, consuming artificial sweeteners that seem real to our bodies just might be setting us up to eat more later on.”
Bloat
While this is a side effect of all soda drinks, it should really be examined with diet varieties. The carbonation in soda causes gases to build in your body and can make you feel (and look) bloated. If your idea of diet is to look and feel slimmer, this imposes the opposite effect you were going for.
Destroys Tooth Enamel
The citric, carbonic and phosphoric acid contained in sodas are known to eat away at tooth enamel. In diet versions your also getting sorbitol and xylitol from the sugar substitutes. Professor Damien Walmsley, head of the British Dental Association recently stated that excess use of sugar-free products could rot the enamel covering the dentine in teeth and ultimately cause teeth to dissolve.
Distorts Taste Buds
Artificial sweeteners are exponentially sweeter than real sugars. When we ingest diet soda with its fake sugary sweetness, we are training our taste buds to enjoy the extra sweetness. Therefore fruits and other normally sweet foods will typically taste bland. Try this, take a drink of soda and then a bite of an apple. Wait a bit and try it with water instead of the diet soda and you should notice a difference.
Mental Trickery
You’ve been so good about drinking your diet soda and saving all those calories, you must be entitled to that extra few bites of desert right? Wrong, although many women use this as their justification to indulge however. This is the primary reason researchers have found that diet soda drinkers find it harder to lose weight than those who drink regular/naturally sweetened soda or none at all.
The Cost
The average American family of four spends $500 per year on soda. By replacing your soda intake with something such as water that provides a health benefit at a near zero cost, you can use the money saved to pay down debt, place it into savings or simply treat yourself or family to something you may otherwise not have.
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