Quick Facts

Soda has been linked to obesity and an increased risk of heart disease. There are many reasons why this might be happening, but the bottom line is, less is more when it comes to soda.

The worst is diet soda, which contains aspartame. This sweetener acts like a poison as your body breaks it down. Despite the assurance that the levels of destructive chemicals aren't high enough to hurt you, aspartame continues to top the charts in complaints to the FDA.

If you must use a sweetener, try xylitol, which tastes like sugar, cooks like sugar, and even has several health benefits.

Is Your Favorite Drink Toxic?

This morning I went on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show and was asked about the new research linking soda consumption with increased risk for heart disease. The surprising thing about this latest smoking gun is that it doesn’t matter if you drink regular soda or diet soda. Either way, people who drink more than one soda a day have a more than 50% increased risk for metabolic syndrome, a precursor to diabetes and heart disease.

Soda that Makes You “POP”

The link between soda drinking and obesity is now well established, and those of us on the “left wing” of nutrition and medicine have been sounding the alarm about diet soda for a long time. Two years ago, a study at the University of Texas Health Science Center found that there was a 41% increase in the risk for being overweight for every single can of diet soda a person consumed daily.

How can something with no calories increase the risk for obesity and heart disease?

There are several possible ways.

First—the obesity connection. My own theory—shared by my friends and colleagues Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades—is that the sweet taste works in the brain to create a conditioned response, and the body responds as it usually does to normal sugar-—with insulin, the fat storing hormone. Those circuits in the brain are pretty primitive and ancient, and they can’t immediately distinguish chemical fakery—as far as your brain is concerned, sweet means sugar. It’s entirely possible that physiologically, you would respond to aspartame in the same way as you would to table sugar. It’s only a theory, but it makes sense.

Second—sugar creates it’s own cravings. Just as a taste of rum creates an unstoppable craving in an alcoholic, it’s entirely possible that the taste of sweet—even if it’s fake—creates the same cascade of cravings in a carb addict that regular sugar does, leading to overeating and binging and all the rest of the reasons people put on weight.

Third—many people think that by drinking diet beverages they’re “saving” calories and they subconsciously allow themselves to eat more, figuring it’s not doing as much harm because overall their meal has less calories since they’re drinking a diet drink. The diet drink gives them subconscious “permission” to eat more. This isn’t conscious, but it’s totally real.

The REAL Heart Disease Connection

Aspartame is primarily made from three ingredients—aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol. Aspartame was approved by the FDA as a food additive in 1974. The folks at the GD Searle Company who produced aspartame shepherded aspartame through the approval process using some highly questionable research methods with an obvious bias. Ever since it passed the FDA hearings, dietitians give it their usual rubber stamp of approval as an innocuous, harmless, proven safe ingredient that can contribute to weight loss.

Nonsense. It is none of the above.

Methanol—an alcohol—breaks down in the body to formaldehyde, a poison if there ever was one. Apologists for aspartame say that it doesn’t create enough formaldehyde in the body to make a difference or cause any damage, but I’m not so sure. Exposing children to formaldehyde levels as low as .75 mg daily for several months has been shown to cause gradual toxicity. Plus, diet soda is frequently stored in hot warehouses, causing even more breakdown that went undetected in the original studies that looked at “ideal” conditions.

And The Danger Only Gets Worse...

There are more smoking guns for the dangers of diet soda. Soda—whether diet or regular—is loaded with chemicals, colorings, flavorings and calcium-robbing phosphoric acid. And Dr. Russell Blaylock’s groundbreaking book “Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills” makes the argument that both aspartame and MSG act as a neurological poisons, exciting neurons to the point where they actually die. Interestingly, aspartame is the “most complained about” ingredient to the FDA—most frequent complaint being headaches.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a double blind randomized controlled study to prove to me that water puts out fire. Soda is bad news, whether regular or diet. Period.

With diet soda—as with sugar—less is more and none is better.

A Better Alternative

If you’re going to use sweetener, I suggest you try Xylitol. It actually tastes like sugar, can be used for cooking and baking, has some health benefits (like preventing bacterial adhesion which is why it’s so good in chewing gums) and as a sugar alcohol, has a very low glycemic load.

Meanwhile, forget about the diet Cokes. They don’t help you lose weight and they may be contributing to a host of other problems you don’t want or need.

As always, let me know what you think!

Warmly,