A short rant about diet drinks!

Originally posted on July 29, 2014 (moved to new website on 22/7/15)

It's school holidays - that means a 3 year old and five month baby at home with me and as a result this blog, as you have noticed, has not been very regular! Apologies... we'll be back to a regular once a week from beginning of September and maybe a few random ones before that.

However yesterday we were in the park and I overheard a conversation something like this:

Largish man arrives with two diet cokes and offers one to a slimmer lady. She refuses and he says, "Isn't it funny that thin people don't like diet drinks but fat people do?!" (his words not mine).

I wanted to explain to him straight away why that is and why it's not funny but it is a huge industry manipulating and misleading people and making their bodies crave what they don't need... but, as I have to do very often as a health coach, I held back... instead I'll have a short rant here ;-)

Since the whole diet/low fat industry was introduced people have steadily got bigger and bigger... why?

I’ll deal with low fat another time – today just a moment of "non-thanks" to the ‘diet/light’ drink industry.

We are constantly told by the media (fed misinformation by industry) that it is all about calories – eat/drink less calories and burn more of them and you will be thinner… wrong! It all depends on what type of calories you are having and whether the additives/fake sugars/other so-called food stuffs made in a laboratory are tricking you brain and body or not.

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discovered some scary facts:

Diet sodas raised the risk of diabetes more than sugar-sweetened sodas!
Women who drank one 330ml diet soda had a 33 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes and women who drank one half litre had a 66 percent increased risk.
Women who drank diet sodas drank twice as much as those who drank sugar- sweetened sodas because artificial sweeteners are more addictive and are hundreds to thousands of times sweeter than regular sugar.
The average diet soda drinker consumes 3 diet drinks a day.
The fake sugars trick the body into thinking it is getting calories, but the calories do not arrive, so it is far more likely that drinkers of diet soda will then need to go and eat something extra to avoid a blood sugar dip.

And yet the myths continue, the advertising shows us glam models quenching their thirst with this poison… yuk!

Best thing on a hot day? Water and lots of it… cheers!