How and why are carbonated soft drinks, even without sugar or calories (like Dr. Pepper Zero), still considered ‘bad’ for your health?
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This is somewhat controversial in the US compared to other countries but the main reason is that they use artificial sweeteners which haven’t been studied for a long time and have had an ever evolving cautionary narrative change over time, ie going from being considered safe in the past to later find out it can cause cancer or some other initially unseen health risk
The acid still present in the drinks, through carbonation and sweeteners, erodes the enamel on your teeth. Some say the artificial sweeteners themselves are bad, but I don’t know much about that.
There are a couple of reasons . I will try to explain In very simple terms..
Reason 1 : There are a lot of micro-organisms living in the gut which perform a tonne of operations.. any food that destroys good gut bacteria and promotes bad gut bacteria are harmful to health. So, food with less fibre, more sugar, ultra processed ingredients, artificial sweeteners, some medications destroy the gut bacteria health and hence should not be consumed
Reason 2: Brain works exactly in the same fashion when you eat real sugar or artificial sugars. It does not get input from stomach. It gets inputs from tongue and taste buds. So as soon as you eat some thing sweet in taste (even though artificial sweeteners) , our body will still prepare as if it is sugar foods. But the problem is – there is no real sugar, so no calories, so in turn it makes you feel more and more hungry and you tend to eat more food in other parts of the day
Also, many studies indicate artificial sweeteners are not good for liver and colon health.
my current knowledge on sweeteners is that they are still very much controversial, because due to how they affect the gut microbiomes ad how they interact with them , it could be potentially more harmful and result in things like obesity despite having little to no calories. That said there is little known about it and most of them are indeed animal studies so conclusive evidence couldnt really be stated about it yet aside from that its probably not harmless(although minimal amount of them do suggest that they might be useful).
also like pacmain stated, there are also other things that do affect
On top of what others have said, a lot of carbonated fluid can irritate your bladder. I speak from personal experience.
Studies have shown that they increase your appetite, encouraging your body to eat/crave more than necessary – that’s probably why you see overweight people not losing any weight despite only drinking zero calorie drinks.
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