How much diet soda do you drink? I won’t lie; I haven’t totally kicked the habit yet either. I probably drink 3 diet sodas per week these days. There was a time where I would drink it every day, but now I don’t stock it in the house. I only drink it when I’m in a restaurant or at someone else’s house.
JD has written about the dangers of diet soda before. But yesterday, Frank wrote a great post about some more reasons to avoid the stuff. The two things that really hit home with me the most were the bone leaching properties of soda (regular and diet) and the iodine leaching aspect.
I’d heard about the bone leaching properties of soda before. I’ve also read how artificial sweeteners can sometimes cause the same insulin response in people as regular sweeteners, thereby making your body susceptible to storing fat. But I’d never head about the iodine issues before.
From what I understand, in an attempt to keep your body’s blood pH from becoming too acidic, it uses its stored supplies of iodine to neutralize that acid. This iodine is no longer able to be used by your thyroid which could slow down your metabolism and make you put on extra weight.
Frank wrote more about the problems of diet soda. You should go check out his post. But I wanted to share the video from his post with you guys as well. It’s a great summary of body chemistry, of how our diets basically force our bodies into an acidic state, and what they do to counteract this problem. Please watch it.
{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh Get Fit Slowly, I was just starting to like you and then you break out the “internet research” pseudoscience…
Sorry Scott–Not every post can please every person. Hope you come back for more.
Aye- the only acid in cola is phosphoric acid and there are studies that show it doesn’t leech minerals out of your body.
This is just magical thinking by people who don’t have a basic understanding of chemistry.
There is also carbonic acid in soda, which is created whenever carbon dioxide is dissolved in water. The main problem I have with this article (other than the fact that it isn’t peer-reviewed scientific data) is that practically everything we eat is acidic. As a matter of fact, I believe egg whites are one of the only non-acidic foods we eat. Besides, compared to stomach secretions, the pH of any soda is pretty mild. I will say though that all sodas are known to degrade the calcium phosphate in teeth. So while on a chemical basis this could occur, to think that our bones are being continuously bathed in the foods we ingest is a little silly.
Being a chemist myself, this video is pretty interesting.
Regardless of the reasoning, one can hardly argue with against eating more fruits and vegetables. However, there’s a bit of a disconnect in his argument about antacids, as they are used to counter acidity on the stomach (low pH), not low pH in cells outside the stomach.
Most foods people eat are of slightly low pH, but I’ve never looked at the pH of the digestion products. It’s an interesting viewpoint, and I’ll have to explore it further.
Thanks!
.-= Greg´s last blog ..Effort vs Talent – Teaching Your Kids To Be Successful =-.
I use soda to clean my golf clubs. That will get you to quit drinking it pretty quick.
I use water to clean mine. Should I stop drinking water?
I don’t drink diet soda (or any soda) having given it up about 10 years ago. I used to use it as a way of not getting hungry, but realized it might have been making me more hungry after all. Plus – being hungry is not a bad thing once you learn how to fuel your body the right way. I now drink sparkling water and just plain water. Aside from coffee and wine, that’s pretty much it.
.-= ShutupandRun´s last blog ..Colorado Marathon Race Report – Part One =-.
I gave up diet soda about 3 months ago cold turkey and I haven’t looked back. Had to do it for my health, so it was actually surprisingly pretty easy. But I do miss the fizz…
Boooo. I love me some Diet Coke. Now you’re making me think twice.
.-= fit36.com´s last blog ..Buying a Foam Roller =-.
I hope you and Frank won’t mind if I share this on my blog – very interesting stuff!
Did you know that cola products are often used to clean toilets that have embedded material issues?
That said, I drink may be three of the 7.5 oz cans of coke zero a week. The rest of the time it’s water, with tea in the AM.
.-= Sayre´s last blog ..Gingerly, Back in the Saddle =-.
This was good stuff!
“Phosphoric Acid is right next to Battery Acid on the PH scale”.
That was crazy.
.-= seth @ fitwithapurpose´s last blog ..Running. Living. Believing. Finishing. =-.
This is PSEUDO SCIENCE folks.
Fact: Your body uses carbonic acid as a pH buffer in your blood- and it doesn’t “leech” minerals to recreate this chemical.
Fact: There are recent studies that show that the phosphoric acid in colas has a NEGLIGIBLE impact on reducing calcium density in bones.
This guy is just perpetuating a bunch of pseudo science myths that only science illiterate people will believe.
You can find the studies on wikipedia under the carbonic and phosphoric acid entries. Or you can take a biology and chemistry 101 class and figure it out for yourself. Don’t believe these lies.
Wow you’re using wikipedia to support your “facts”.
Well I can pull dubious “facts” from the internet just as well as you can.
from the wikipidia entry for coca cola
“Studies have shown that regular soft drink users have a lower intake of calcium, magnesium, ascorbic acid, riboflavin, and vitamin A.[83]“
What’s funny is you don’t know how to read.
“..have a lower INTAKE…”
Basically that sentence says that people that drink sodas regularly have poor diets.
The study I was referring to measured the calcium excreted in urine.
Sorry if you didn’t know but this whole alkaline/acid body balancing is total pseudo-scientific bullshit. Glad to see I’m not the first person to say that here.
http://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/your-urine-is-not-a-window-to-your-body-ph-balancing-a-failed-hypothesis/#more-1424
http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH?d=dmtHMSContent&c=465747&p=~br,IHW|~st,24479|~r,WSIHW000|~b,*
Here is a fun quote from the above link:
“Do Dietitians and Other Health Care Professionals Recommend Alkaline Diets?
No. Studies of alkaline diet are limited to animal and test tube trials. There’s no scientific evidence at this time that alkaline diets are beneficial to humans.”
Thanks for the links, Danny. The main point of my article, hence the title, was about Diet Soda. Here are some links that point to others who believe it is bad for you:
Researchers at Tufts University, studying several thousand men and women, found that women who regularly drank cola-based sodas — three or more a day — had almost 4% lower bone mineral density in the hip, even though researchers controlled for calcium and vitamin D intake. But women who drank non-cola soft drinks, like Sprite or Mountain Dew, didn’t appear to have lower bone density.
While this NY Times article doesn’t directly relate soda to osteoporosis, it does say that when soda replaces other healthier drinks, it may lead to bone loss. I know, I know, milk isn’t good for you either.
And here is a link to quotes from various researchers regarding their opinions on soda, regular or diet.
There are two sides to every story.
Hey Mac,
Don’t get me wrong! I completely agree that a diet high in soda is most likely NOT healthy. I also completely agree with your references, excluding any quotes from anyone purporting a “natural” cure for something. What I wanted to point out is that this video isn’t making a case for why it’s not a good idea to drink too much soda, it’s suggesting that we gain weight because our bodies become alkaline because we eat too much acidic food. That claim is simply unfounded.
I once met a man who was trying to promote an “alkaline” diet because he said it could cure my friend’s very bad allergies. In fact it could cure just about any affliction, including obesity. Of course he had ALL the necessary products for living such a lifestyle for sale. He was swindling the whole neighborhood with this same exact pseudo-scientific nonsense. I find this misinformation very dangerous and manipulative and that is why I was so quick to comment on it.
Also, I think it stands to reason that any person who consumes mostly soda, probably lives an otherwise unhealthy lifestyle and so in general those people will tend to have adverse health effects attributed to not only their excessive intake of sugary beverages, but probably other typical health issues as well.
In any case I’m happy to find that there are people still willing to engage in a civil discourse on the internet.
Thanks, Mac!
I kicked the diet coke about 6 weeks ago and don’t miss it! Glad I did after reading this
also, theres no reason this effect, to whatever minimal extent its real, shuold be limited to diet soda. so why the focus there?
Processed artificial anything not even worth consuming.
If HAVE to have a soda fix I try to go with something that has real cane sugar and words on the ingredients list I can pronounce and recognize as a real ingredient.
Any diet that makes excuses to consume more sugar, real or not is down right misinformed. Everyone gets plenty of sugar.
+1 on the PH levels in the body.
.-= Lyndit´s last blog ..Meet Justin Talerico – CEO of ion =-.
Why did I stop drinking diet soda? I did for a little while and my migraines’ frequency dropped dramatically. That anecdotal evidence has been enough for me!
“IÂ’d heard about the bone leaching properties of soda before. IÂ’ve also read how artificial sweeteners can sometimes cause the same insulin response in people as regular sweeteners, thereby making your body susceptible to storing fat. ”
Oh, so you’ve ‘heard’ and ‘read’ about leaching and insulin response to diet soda? Can you provide more evidence than this, cites?
I think this was an interesting thought experiment, however it’s not pure science. Lets not confuse the two. Most of his connections were tenuous at best. I’d love to see this exact same video only backed up with research.
Are you serious?
“ItÂ’s a great summary of body chemistry, of how our diets basically force our bodies into an acidic state, and what they do to counteract this problem. ”
C’mon. Read your 1st year colleage biochemistry book and you’ll learn differently. This is a perpetuation of crap pseudo-science. Please don’t post stuff like this…
.-= Mungo´s last blog ..A Walk in the East Don River Valley =-.
I also have to disagree with the argument that diet soda causes iodine deficiency which causes hypothyroidism which causes weight gain. Americans eat a diet extremely high in iodized salt, making iodine deficiency extremely rare. Hypothyroidism is also extremely rare when compared to the number of people that drink diet soda. As far as I can tell, iodine isn’t an important buffer in the human body. It isn’t stored in a high enough quantity to make it useful as a buffer. Also, in my reading I wasn’t able to find any information on a mechanism used by the body to mobilize stored iodone the way the body can mobilize calcium. Does calcium even act as a buffer? Very little calcium exists in the blood in an ionized form. The majority of serum calcium is bound to albumin making it unavailable.
I did a quick pubmed search to see if I could find any medical literature on a link between diet sodas and hypothyroidism or between diet sodas and iodine defficiency and nothing came up. If there is a link there it hasn’t been shown by any research.
I fail to see the problem. Soda, like sweet, delicious beer, is an *excellent* source of water.
/homer
.-= Tom Accuosti´s last blog ..Masonic Traveling =-.
I think the only “fact” on this page is in Tom’s comment.
It’s always good to remember that correlation is not causality….
Interestingly, that article about the Tufts research and bone mineral density cited above is on WebMD. In the article, there are 7 bullet points for maintaining bone health, the majority of which encourage increased milk consumption. The National Dairy Council is a major sponsor of WebMD.
Eh. Usually there’s this big mumbo-jumbo about “artificial – bad, natural – good”. I personally don’t subscribe to it. I’m no doctor (just an engineer with common sense), but the scientific method is performed as follows: first you observe a causation, then you start looking for explanations. The fact that fat people drink soda is not a good causation, since in all likelihood, fatties drink soda because they are indeed fat (and want to get thin), not the other way around.
Now, all points in the first article (JD), and the last and most interesting point (iodine-leeching) of the second article (by Frank) can easily be validated in a simple experiment: take ten fatties, prescribe them the exact same diet, but let five have sodas, and the other five water. There isn’t any such experiment I know of, and I’m pretty sure it’s been tried with no definitive results.
I do tend to agree at least with the possibility of the “mental” effects (“I can have more food, as I’m drinking diet soda!” or a sweet-tooth propagated by the great amounts of soda). I even agree with the basic common-sense of “too much of anything is bad”, and you should limit your soda consumption mostly because three cans of soda per day is not the best thing to do to your teeth. However, I wouldn’t go about it in such a dogmatic way the way most wholefoods nuts do, nor let myself believe a complex explanation on how the acidity of diet soda affects my blood pH, which in turn takes away my iodine, and causes my thyroid to malfunction, and makes me fat, before seeing a *simple* experiment like I described above. That, is just bad science (http://www.badscience.net/).
terrifying!! but good to know.
I agree that Diet soda is anot a healthy thing, but the whole theory of acid vs. alkaline food affecting your body Ph pretty much proven to be pure bunk. On the Quackwatch site, which is a pretty reliable source for evidence-based medicine, they say:
“… no foods change the acidity of anything in your body except your urine. Your stomach is so acidic that no food can change its acidity. . . All foods that leave your stomach are acidic. Then they enter your intestines where secretions from your pancreas neutralize the stomach acids. So no matter what you eat, the food in stomach is acidic and the food in the intestines is alkaline.. . Dietary modification cannot change the acidity of any part of your body except your urine. Your bloodstream and organs control acidity in a very narrow range. Anything that changed acidity in your body would make you very sick and could even kill you”
More here:
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral2.html
There are arguments for and against consuming diet soda, some scientific, others common sense and a few rather subjective. I’m going to seek the solution that always works for me, i.e. results! Up until now, I’ve been consuming 2-3 diet sodas per day while dieting. Trying to lose weight has always been a slow and frustrating experience, but I’ve been doing a lot of aerobics in the past couple of months while the weight loss has been very slow. Le me give sans diet soda a go and report back on the outcome.
Wow! Yet another reason to skip the diet soda. Thanks.
I personally try to limit my soda intake but avoid diet at all costs… the way I see it, there’s enough chemistry in regular soda, but at least my body know what to do with sugar. I can’t say the same for artificial sweeteners..
the day i used it to get acid off my car battery , i stopped drinking it. Just drink water that’s all that your body needs.
I have had horrible acid reflux for six months straight. I’m also on thyroid medication. I drink about four to five cans of diet cola a day. To me, it makes alot of sense to try to restore the PH balance in my body back to normal.
What does it hurt to try to eat more foods that are alkanine rather than acidic?!
I do not know if there is any scientific support for this or not. Here is what I do know. 12 years ago I started drinking diet soda. I have gradually gained weight until I hit 230lbs this last year. I have also struggled with depression and a B vitamin deficiency. This year I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid.
Interestingly I also developed an allergy to shellfish 3 years ago. I finally went to a naturopath dr for an assessment mostly to appease a friend. What I was told was that I did not have a shellfish allergy but rather an iodine deficieny and the reason my body reacted to iodine the way it did was because I had replaced my depleted iodine stores with floride, bromide and chloride. When actual iodine was re-introduced, my body would dump the other three in favor of the iodine-which caused the reaction.
I have slowly increased my iodine intake and am at a point where I can eat shellfish with no problems.
How might diet soda effect the iodine level and metabolism of someone that doesnt have a thyroid and uses medication to regulate thier thyroid?