Is it safe to drink non-sugary drinks (like coke zero) while on a diet? Or do the artificial sweeteners just make you fat in some sneaky way?
In: Chemistry
Hotly debated. Get ready for a firestorm.
What is known is that people who drink diet or sugar free sodas do not on average show any demonstrable health benefits compared to drinking sugared drinks. The artificial sugars still give you an insulin spike, which is the thing that is “bad” for dieting. It makes you feel hungry.
However, there are fewer calories in a sugar-free beverage. In terms of pure calories in calories out, and excluding all other factors, changing from a sugared drink to a sugar-free drink and changing nothing else at all can have a large impact on your weight.
Welcome to the wonderfulworld of nutrition, where we can’t test people in labs, so we don’t know very much for sure.
Some people think that drinking a zero-calorie drinks makes you feel like you did something “good”, so you let your guard down and end up eating more food later as a reward. Some people also think that too much artificial sweetener makes the good germs in our tummies sick, which isn’t good for us.
Zero calarie sodas have zero calories in the., meaning they won’t “make you fat” however some people believe that the sweetness of diet sodas causes you to crave other sweet things. But strictly speaking if you were on a deserted island and there was no food and you found a shipping crate of diet 7-up washed up on shore, you would still starve to death no matter how much of it you drank
Also, diet sodas have aspartame as an artificial sweetener. Aspartame has been linked to migraines, and might make them worse for migraine sufferers.
While limiting your sugar and caloric intake is good for you, diet sodas are by no means a proven method for weight loss.
They are considered pretty safe but you are right in your suspicions, lately there’s been increasing evidence that they can adversely effect metabolism and trigger issues that plain sugar can too.
So moderation as ever, is best.
From https://www.forksoverknives.com/wellness/artificial-sweeteners-can-make-you-gain-weight/
“Do we have direct evidence that diet beverages can adversely impact body weight? Yes. If you swap out diet beverages for water, there theoretically should be no difference in weight control since they both provide zero calories, right? Well, when researchers put it to the test, overweight and obese individuals on a diet randomized to replace diet beverages with water lost significantly more weight, about 15 percent more over six months.”
Here is an older study just on the nature of most sweeteners, but it is not a critique as such https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198517/
Ok so what makes you fat is energy. Energy can be stored in many forms but that doesn’t have to concern you since the total energy is on the product. Usually energy/100g or ml. Coke Zero contains about 1-2 kcal/100ml. So not 0 but not much.
Energy is given usually in two units kJ and kcal (kcal is 1000×cal = 1 Cal so Cal and kcal are the same. Idiotic system dont get confused by it.) To put things in comparison a usual adult needs 2000 kcal per day. So a glass of Coke Zero with its 3-4 kcal is not much.
How much you should eat when dieting depends on how much you move, whether you wanna build muscles or get thinner. If you move as much as a soldier or some pro athlete you can easily take 6000 kcal per day.
The reason why you should avoid even zero drinks is because they contains many other substances that aren’t healthy like phosphoric acid and caffeine. But without doubt the biggest issue with drinks is their sugar content so if you like zero drinks they wont make you fat.
The only way they are beneficial for weight loss is due to the fact that they have less calories. Which means, all other factors unchanged, you just pour less fuel into your body.
It won’t make you lose weight if you replace those calories by eating cake. It’s passive and a diet soda won’t cancel out a Twinkie as some people assume.
That being said there are pills you can take that prevent fats from being digested.
They have less calories, which is good, but they still trigger the same digestive processes as actually consuming sugar.
There is evidence to suggest that artificially sweetened sodas contribute towards diabetes in the same way that sugary sodas do.
Just my personal experience. When I was losing weight I found Coke Zero to be a life saver. I was able to satisfy my craving for sweetness and not ingest any sugar. It work very well for me. I drink it any time I want Coke now. There’s probably some other awful side effect of aspartame, who knows, but my concern at the moment is weight loss and for that, it is effective (for me).
Sugar substitutes work on the premise that they’re SO MUCH sweeter than sugar that an incredibly small amount is needed to make the drink as sweet. Because of this the calories of the sweetener are essentially immeasurable for the purpose of our nutrition standards. The artificial sweetners themselves literally do not have the amount calories to make you fat.
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