Drinking Soda, Even Diet Soda, Can Result in Weight Gain

About 20 years ago, one of my good friends, who is a doctor, told me that when you drink diet soda with aspartame (often called NutraSweet), it goes into your body and doesn’t come out. Since I couldn’t just Google “aspartame” on the Internet back then, I decided to just stop drinking the 3-5 cans of diet soda I consumed weekly. If I really wanted a soda, I drank the real thing with all the sugar.

Now the funny thing was that I started drinking diet soda because I was concerned about keeping my weight down and wanted to satisfy my craving for something sweet. Guess what happened, I lost about 5 pounds from never drinking diet soda again, and I never put those 5 pounds back on!

After so many years, an article in O Magazine spurred me to finally find out the real deal about aspartame. There are lots of websites that will tell you that your body converts aspartame into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol, and that your body processes these the same way that it does as if they came from whole foods. Whether or not that ‘s true or not, I don’t know. To get an independent opinion, I took a look at the Mayo Clinic’s site. According to the Mayo Clinic, aspartame is only dangerous for people with the rare hereditary disease phenylketonuria.

However, the Mayo Clinic does state that drinking soda is consuming empty calories. You may enjoy the taste, but you’re not putting anything in your body that will help fuel it. So drink soda as an occasional treat. From my personal experience, if you don’t have diabetes, eliminate the diet soda and for the occasional treat, have a real soda with all of the sugar and corn syrup (none of which is good for you), and I’ll bet you find that you’ll lose a couple of pounds permanently with this small change to your diet.