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Is diet soda/artificial sweeteners bad for you?

F

Frisco

macrumors 68020
Original poster
I love soda/Coke, but I was trying to lose weight so a few months ago I switched to Diet Coke. My friend told me Diet Coke is terrible for your body, so I Googled it and I came across all kinds of crazy stuff, like it causes brain cancer and is converted into Wood Alcohol (Methanol) in the liver. That is unbelievable if true. Isn't wood alcohol a poison? I was also trying to avoid alcohol on my diet, but I guess I have been inadvertently putting it in my body with diet coke.

Anyone know the facts?
 
I go by the belief that everything taken in excess can cause cancer. So, moderate.

Honestly, there are all sorts of theories about everything causing cancer. If it's proven, you can be sure it won't be in drinks anymore. However, these synthetic chemicals that they use as sweeteners generally trick the body by almost being a sugar, but aren't digestable because they've got a slightly different element somewhere. Who knows what they actually do to your body but I'm one who believes there's no reason to use them as it's just not worth the risk.
 
If you're worried about the aspartame health scare, there is now a version of Diet Coke with sucralose, which is subject to an entirely different health scare, in turn, are wholly separate from the refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup scares.

In fact, most beverages, diet or not, contain significant amounts of the deadly chemical DHMO. Abstinence from drinking may be the safest course.
 
Who really knows? If history is a guide, I'd put my money on artificial sweeteners being a bad thing.

In the 19th century, upper class women would drink arsenic mixed with vinegar or rub arsenic on their skin to give themselves a fairer complexion.
 
Frisco said:
Anyone know the facts?
Click to expand...

Sadly, no. There's research on Aspartame that points to brain cancer, brain tumors, and chemical imbalances, and there's studies that say the opposite.

iMeowbot said:
Abstinence from drinking may be the safest course.
Click to expand...

I agree, but only abstain from drinking soda, abstaining from drinking water will cause very serious health issues 😉.

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In general, you absolutley want to stay away from saccharin-based sweeteners which have been shown to cause cancer in animals (they often come in the pink sachets, e.g. at Starbucks). Nutrasweet (Aspartame; blue sachet) and Splenda (Sucralose; yellow sachet) based products are safe as far as I know (unless you have Phenylketonuria, a rare genetic disorder). However, they are only as safe as other artificial food additives (e.g., artificial colors, flavors, preservatives). That is, they are always not as good for your body as an all-natural diet would be.

I believe it's ok to use Nutrasweet and Splenda based sweeteners and diet soda products if you don't use them to excess (that is, make sure to also drink water and not just these sodas).

If you want to be absolutely safe, you should sweeten your coffee, tea, and desserts with Stevia, a calorie-free, sweet extract that's made from the Stevia leaf and is 100% natural. Stevia is available at health food stores. It's not cheap but will last you forever. In Japan, some diet sodas are actually sweetened with Stevia (e.g., Pocari Stevia), which would basically be the way to go.
 
The sweetener in question is aspartame which some say cause health problems.

Though some diet drinks are instead using splenda as a sweetener (diet coke included)

"In 2005, under pressure from retailer Wal-Mart (which was impressed with the popularity of Splenda sweetener), and despite their previous blunder with New Coke, the company released a new formulation called "Diet Coke sweetened with Splenda". Sucralose replaces aspartame in this version. Early sales reports for this version were not quite as strong as anticipated; however, Coca-Cola did little advertising for the brand, investing money and advertising in Coca-Cola Zero instead. The introduction of the Splenda sweetened version of Diet Coke saw complaints to bottlers, as store shelves would often go with very little of the normal version of Diet Coke."-Wikipedia

Just look for this
image002.jpg


*edit* Beaten to the punch...
 
No-one has been subjected to artifical stuff for long enough to know long term effects. I avoid Aspartame and it's relatives as much as I can.
 
iMeowbot said:
In fact, most beverages, diet or not, contain significant amounts of the deadly chemical DHMO. Abstinence from drinking may be the safest course.
Click to expand...
seriously, this kind of sarcasm should stop... for those who have no idea what DHMO is, this could really sound scary
 
scem0 said:
I agree, but only abstain from drinking soda, abstaining from drinking water will cause very serious health issues 😉.
Click to expand...
Studies have consistently shown that this is exactly where the highest levels of DHMO contamination are found. I'd rather drink mercury! 😱
 
As a molecular biologist researcher I can tell you that the list of carcinogenic compounds both natural and artifical is staggering. 😱 Almost everything that we ingest (eat or drink) or even the air we breathe contains some level of carcinogens. The real questions that eludes scientists is why, under essentially the same environmental conditions, some people get cancer and others do not.

As for artifical sweeteners, some are not very different from natural sweeteners they differ in that they cannot be processed by the body for energy (calories). Adverse reactions to compounds such as artificial sweeteners are not uncommon. Any person can have a physical allergic reaction to substance, peanuts for example. A popular misconception is that artificial sweeteners are bad because they "trick" the brain into tasting sweetness. In fact all sweeteners both natural and artifical trick the brain into tasting sweet, sweet is just our perception of what a particular compounds tastes like. Anti-freeze apparantly tastes sweet, but it is terribly toxic.

In short a diet soda is probably no worse for your body than the burger and fries that are served with it. I strongly agree with a previous poster that moderation is usually the best tactic. 🙂
 
Depends on your point of view. Personally, artificial sweetener is definitely better for my health than sugar.

Everything in moderation though.
 
bearbo said:
seriously, this kind of sarcasm should stop... for those who have no idea what DHMO is, this could really sound scary
Click to expand...
The adjective, deadly, kind of placed it over the top. -10 points for bad use of sarcasm!
 
Aspartame (nutra sweet)

Yes, there are health issues concerning nutra sweet. It converts to methanol and formaldehyde, methanol is a neurotoxin and formaldehyde is a carcinogen. Not good stuff, and I would recommend avoiding it. I would also recommend avoiding anyone that talks about DHMO as they clearly are being smartass and have no real respect for the reality behind toxic exposures.

Splenda is a chlorinated sugar alcohol. It is an organic compound with three chlorine atoms. I would only enjoy that at your own risk as well. There was little-to-no testing done on it. We know that many chlorinated organics are bad, whether directly or indirectly as chemical metabolites.
 
I say if you are going to drink coke just drink the real stuff! But drink it very occasionally 🙂 Thats my theory if you are going to have something junky just have the 'real' version of it
 
gelbin said:
Yes, there are health issues concerning nutra sweet. It converts to methanol and formaldehyde, methanol is a neurotoxin and formaldehyde is a carcinogen. Not good stuff, and I would recommend avoiding it.
Click to expand...
And that would be really scary if our bodies didn't routinely produce these anyway. These are hardly unique to aspartame!

I would also recommend avoiding anyone that talks about DHMO as they clearly are being smartass and have no real respect for the reality behind toxic exposures.
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I would most certainly recommend avoiding anyone who talks about these sweeteners as deadly chemicals is clearly a scare-mongerer and to be ignored at all costs. The reality is that they are all about as dangerous as that water, it's all about consuming reasonable amounts of things.

Splenda is a chlorinated sugar alcohol. It is an organic compound with three chlorine atoms. I would only enjoy that at your own risk as well. There was little-to-no testing done on it. We know that many chlorinated organics are bad, whether directly or indirectly as chemical metabolites.
Click to expand...
See, this is flat out disinformation and precisely what I was getting at. Sucralose most certainly did go through human trials. The "no clinical trials on the final product" scare is based on the notion that it's somehow going to be a fundamentally different product when they stuff it into envelopes.
 
Beyond the Saccharin cancer scare of the 1970s, I haven't seen a lot of hype about artificial sweeteners, though there was a poisoning scare a while back.

Aspartame, which is used in a lot of products, supposedly causes memory loss, with fairly casual contact.

In any case, soda with sugar combined with a balanced diet is much better than betting everything on diet soda.
 
The only things I've heard are increased chance of migranes and higher susceptibility to spatial disorientation (it's an aviation thing...)

I'm not convinced it's bad but because of the chance of those, I stay away from it.
 
true777 said:
In general, you absolutley want to stay away from saccharin-based sweeteners which have been shown to cause cancer in animals
Click to expand...

That's ********. Overwatering rats causes them to get cancer. Some testing in the 50s with rats showed artificial sweeteners, when given to rats via an intravenous overdose of water, caused cancer. Amazing.

Artificial sweeteners have been on the market for 30 years. Brain cancer rates have gone down.

Urban legends die hard though, so I fully expect to be told I'm full of ****.
 
garfield2002 said:
As a molecular biologist researcher I can tell you that the list of carcinogenic compounds both natural and artifical is staggering. 😱 Almost everything that we ingest (eat or drink) or even the air we breathe contains some level of carcinogens. The real questions that eludes scientists is why, under essentially the same environmental conditions, some people get cancer and others do not.

As for artifical sweeteners, some are not very different from natural sweeteners they differ in that they cannot be processed by the body for energy (calories). Adverse reactions to compounds such as artificial sweeteners are not uncommon. Any person can have a physical allergic reaction to substance, peanuts for example. A popular misconception is that artificial sweeteners are bad because they "trick" the brain into tasting sweetness. In fact all sweeteners both natural and artifical trick the brain into tasting sweet, sweet is just our perception of what a particular compounds tastes like. Anti-freeze apparantly tastes sweet, but it is terribly toxic.

In short a diet soda is probably no worse for your body than the burger and fries that are served with it. I strongly agree with a previous poster that moderation is usually the best tactic. 🙂
Click to expand...

For a person to get cancer, a bunch of thresholds have to be broken (if you look at, for example the ability to form the first unstable cell, the immune response, etc), if you look at it from a modelling perspective, and many, if not all of these steps of bifurcations exhibit some or strong hysteresis (meaning that if you just tip over the edge of some threshold by an amount, something catastrophic happens that take more to go back to the initial condition than the small amount that sent you over), and finally everyone has a slightly different set of parameters (genetic predisposition, current state of health, age, previous contact of carcinogens) and a different set of noise (luck), the entire health system subjected to carcinogens is then fairly stochastic, deterministically random. With no clear barriers that can be defined for all people in general, due to a lot of resetting parameters and individuallity and the high sensitivity of starting conditions.

This has really been a problem for traditional medicine and the entire medical science community because the amount of research and scientific work put into various problems in that area in the traditional way increases disproportionately large for a small increase in the complexity of the problem. In essence, traditional medicine and medical science is quite flawed if it seeks to cure and understand from a generalized point of view averaging all humans as a target. Some new problems, like cancer, is so sensitive to individuality in a person that most attempts to generalize it has been failures, except to say "if you contact carcinogens, you'll probably get cancer" and "everything causes cancer", the popular attitudes toward this topic.
 
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