Been drinking exclusively (give or take) no-sugar caffeinated sodas since a child. Not obese or diabetic. Mid-thirties now. How bad is this?
I’m no doctor, but when I started limiting my beer in-take I drank a lot of seltzer water and I think it helped.
I personally preferred to go the snob route and only drink plain seltzer. But other people seem to like the flavored stuff, idk if that would have the same effect.
Not the answer to your question but: Have you tried water? It’s really not that bad. Some even like it.
As for your question: Mayo clinic says “It’s not known if drinking diet soda every day is harmful. The evidence on diet soda’s health effects isn’t clear”. So no one knows, but I thank you for your contribution to this experiment. Hope it works out well.
Yea but what does a mayonaise clinic know about sprite
Yes. It tastes foul. I’m addicted to caffeine. I’ve tried to cut back over the years and I just can’t.
Tap water is genuinely terrible in some areas. Have you tried bottled water?
My family uses a water softening filter on our tap water and it makes it go from awful tasting to pretty good. We just store water in a jug after filtering and it really helps and is far cheaper than bottled water.
One of the ways I cut back was to have water sitting next to my soda for the first few months. Just have water right next to it. I would always make sure it was fresh, cold water with ice if possible. I would alternate between them so I was getting more water, but also so I could get used to the taste again.
Now, if I ever have a sweet drink, I follow it up with a glass of water after. Even if you just balance it between the two, it’s better than drinking only soda. Moderation is better than nothing at all.
Have you tried various flavored waters or seltzers? Long term the caffeine addiction probably isn’t that great for you either.
You don’t have to go cold turkey, but if I were you I would try to taper down your soda consumption and see how that makes you feel. You may also be slightly dehydrated and a little water (as in flavored waters, if you can handle it) may make you feel a little better.
How about fizzy water? (Carbonated water)
Salt always seems to be added to fizzy water. There’s probably a reason. It’s very noticeable and unpleasant. In other carbonated drinks the saltiness is masked. (All carbonated drinks seem to have salt.)
I’m not convinced drinking seltzer is any better than a no-sugar cola. One still has the concerns of carbon dioxide making bones more brittle. Issues about artificial sweeteners and over consumption of caffeine are removed, but at that point just drink water.
Water isn’t addictive, neither is seltzer, but caffeinated drinks are. This advice to just drink seltzer/water is just as helpful as telling a life-time cigarette smoker, “just suck on a stick and pretend you’re smoking”.
Water is amazing. It comes out of taps. It’s practically free.
Drink some water, dawg. Please.
I reckon 3.5/10 bad.
I’d at least try to offset it with water and tea.
Might be in the risk zone for gout, depending on diet. I’d drink tea.
Exactly this. It is the reason I got gout.
Yes it is also a genetic predisposition thing but the moment you find out it’s to late.
You can abuse your body a hell of a lot up to that age without too many issues. Those issues will start hitting home within the next decade or so though. Make a change for the better while you can.
probably gonna affect your teeth more than anything… but I’m no doctor
Yea I’m also most worried about dental health, soda is pretty hard on teeth.
Bad. Best regards from your older age.
Seems like a recipe for kidney stones and a crippling caffeine dependency.
I had gallstones and my gallbladder was removed. I put that down to malnutrition though.
Sounds like you have some pretty intense diet issues going on, unfortunately.
Its not good. Caffeinated sodas are a diathetic and it will pull water out of your system. Check out ChubbyEmu’s Channel on YouTube for the explanation. If you have been drinking exclusively sodas since a child with no water in take you could be damaging your liver and kidneys. Also I would strongly suggest taking a muti-vitimin daily. Most diet sodas make it harder for you to absorb certain nutrients like folic acid and IIRC B-12.
If you were one of the people that Aspartame is an issue you would know it by know because almost every time you drank soda you would have a headache. You are probably getting more of them just from the dehydration.
Then there are the dental issues. I don’t care how old you are, start using sensodyne and look at having your teeth sealed. Your dentist can do wonders that were not possible 15 years ago, but that will give you issues.
Now a while back there was a thing about sodas and diet sodas raising your risk of Cancer but you would have to drink 6L+ a day. Lower amounts are believed to actually fight against cancer cells in their early stages.
I did that. My teeth are ruined, my breath is nearly always bad. I’ve had more root canals than is responsible, and it’s been massively expensive.
Drink water and brush your teeth.
„insulin resistance“ is not an exclusive diabetic issue and not a 0/1 thing. Almost every human is at least a bit insulin resistant.
The more sugar one eats, the more insulin has to be produced by the pancreas and the more „deaf“ cells become to the signal „insulin“.
There’s more effects which I’m not certain enough to comment on here.
Do you suffer any symptoms? (Dry skin, weight, etc) or are you literally the most healthy human right now?
If you suffer any symptoms it might be good to learn more about sugar, as some symptoms might seemingly not be associated with sugar intake but are in reality the root issue of some problems.
Even sugar-free drinks are suspected to increase your chance of diabetes, obesity, and a wide variety of other health issues. High consumption of artifically sweetened beverages are suspected to increase your likelihood of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer, notably a large increase in cholecystectomies, which you say you’ve had.
Here’s a long review of smaller-scale studies of a variety of associations and/or suspected causations of diet soda consumption - Notably arterial disease and “remodelling”, Weight gain, Depression in later life, Eating disorders, impaired cognitive development, hip fractures, UTIs, Diabetic retinopathy, End-stage renal disease, Leukemia and lymphoma, and overall mortality. The review concluded that by objective standards, the included studies were all at least of “moderate” quality.
Need I go on?
Is a lot of that going to be correlative? For sure yeah. Is it still maybe a very good idea to incorporate more water into your diet? Also yeah.
Thanks for the links. I’ll give them a read through.
They didn’t separate artificial sweetened beverages from those with sugar in the article about gallbladder cancer. That’s sort of… important from my perspective. Cancer and gallstones are different things anyway. I’m confidant my issues were with malnutrition over my gallbladder and the problematic gallstones.
Likewise, obese people consume “diet” sodas in an attempt to diet. Even in that review it has garbage conclusions like “consumption of any type of soda”. Yea, that’s real helpful in figuring out if aspartame is a carcinogen–let’s sample people who don’t drink aspartame exclusively to collect two data-sets: those that drink water exclusively and those that drink sugar-soda exclusively. That says nothing about aspartame.
A lot of this is garbage. I hate meta-reviews. They’re always garbage.
Like, I’ve already stated I’m not obese, yet people keep bringing up obesity and sugar-related diseases. Thanks for not reading.
