How do zero calories soft drinks work in relation to weight gain/loss?

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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

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally speaking, you’re going to be taking in fewer sugary calories if you drink artificially sweetened drinks instead of surgary ones, so it’s going to be better for any diet. But, it’s difficult to find any real consensus for how bad even zero-calorie soft drinks are for any healthy diet. You’ll almost certainly be in the best position by eliminating them entirely (at least for regular consumption, treating yourself from time to time is generally fine) and focus on just good clean pure water consumption to satisfy your thirst. But, for some, completely eliminating sodas is a bridge too far and will compromise their ability to stick with a diet, so keeping some zero-calorie drinks in there lets them get that fix without the sugar.

I remember reading some things about how taking in a lot of artificially-sweetened food/drinks can mess with your body’s metabolism. Your body senses you’re ingesting sweet things and is expecting a nice caloric boost, but doesn’t get it, and over time this alters the way it processes actual sugars to focus on storing them rather than utilizing them because it learns that they are much rarer than expected, but I don’t remember the source or how well-studied this effect is (if it is even real).

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t make you fatter, they just give you a higher risk of things like cancer. But then again, sugar’d drinks give you a higher risk of things like cancer from a bad diet, so which is worse is debatable

Anonymous 0 Comments

Every beer belly ever, not really, but the the aspartame thing, I recall a Norwest Airline pilot who got grounded for alcohol, but all he drank was copious amounts of diet coke. The other is an observation about drinking alcohol, and your bodies trying to detoxify the poisions as a first priority to survival

Anonymous 0 Comments

>Is it safe to drink non-sugary drinks (like coke zero) while on a diet?

Perfectly safe at the recommended dose.

>Or do the artificial sweeteners just make you fat in some sneaky way?

The way you store fat is by consuming more energy than you need per day. The excess is stored for later. That energy is measured in kcal and historically was dense in sweet tasting things, like sugar. We found other substances that taste sweet that we either can’t digest or are ‘sweet enough’ using incredibly small doses.

So no, a couple of hours chillin at 37c(homeostasis) likely used more energy than whats in your coke zero.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you have to have a soda yes get the diet one but they still will cause a spike in your blood sugar just like real soda (which can trigger hunger cravings) but wo the calories. From a purely weight loss view diet is better from a health stand point they are both crappy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Artificial sweeteners are definitely less fattening than sugar, at least in the short run.

Some people are worried that over the long run they’ll teach your body not to associate sweetness with food value, so you’ll start eating more because your sweet thing doesn’t feel like food. Some other people are worried that some artificial sweeteners might be chronic cumulative poisons, so people will eventually start getting sick from them in a few decades and by then it’ll be too late to do anything about it. But if you want to lose weight right now and aren’t worried about those uncertain long-term effects, there’s no doubt that artificial sweeteners work better than an equivalent amount of sugar.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of these comments are wrong and based on theories people have, examples:

>*”Best thing to do is to not drink it, so your body isn’t expecting sugar/cals and won’t produce the chems to store and process it”*
>
>*”You would still starve to death no matter how much of it you drank”*

Both are very wrong. In terms of weight loss, zero calorie beverages can help remove sugary cravings you might have, feel like a 150cal bar of chocolate?, have a zero calorie drink instead. They fill the stomach also adding to a feeling of fullness. In terms of gut microbiology it might not be the best thing in the world but using them in moderation is an ideal way to supplement for weight loss (ask anyone that’s actually lost weight or dieted extremely hard for a bodybuilding show for example… [Reference of this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIK975W3SI)). I’m not sure what “chems” your body will produce (someone wrote that not knowing what they were talking about) but more work for the body means a raised metabolism, means more weight loss. You’ll know when you’ve had enough when you get indigestion, stomach pain, diarrhea. **Use in moderation**.

You could also hypothetically survive drinking solely zero calorie beverages as most do have some small amount of calories. They do however round down on the label per serving size. So you’d need a lot, but you could still survive.

They won’t make you fat in some sneaky way as long as you stay loyal to your diet and don’t go looking for foods to blame when you know you ate 500cals over maintenance. The important thing is to use them in moderation in conjunction with a consistent diet. The answer you’re looking for can be found in the video linked that was uploaded just a week ago.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My understanding is that some of no calorie sweeteners, like aspartame, convert to alcohol while digesting

One effect of any alcohol is the liver is busy detoxifying and fat gets stored for later instead of processed

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally, if you take in more energy in the form of food than you use by living and moving, you will gain weight. If you use more energy than you eat and drink, you will lose weight. If a drink doesn’t have something in it that the body can break down for fuel (basically carbs, proteins, fats and alcohols), then it won’t contribute to your energy intake.

How you store excess energy (fat, muscle, etc.) and whether or not you consciously or subconsciously *want* to consume excess energy is incredibly complicated and individual, based on your genes, exercise levels, what types of food you eat, what kinds of bacteria live in your gut, and probably a million other things what we know anywhere from a lot to a tiny amount about.

Anonymous 0 Comments

See, this is what is actually happening here:

The soda makers took a lot of flack from bad parents in the 1980s and 1990s who apparently can’t stop buying sodas and then getting pissed when their kids got fat.

So, to avoid Congress coming in and regulating with some sort of sugar crackdown, they all redid their recipes and also introduced low calorie drinks to trick people into thinking they’d actually changed.

Soda Zero or Diet or whatever they call it is not going to help you lose weight.

See, the soda companies did this because they were already aware that most people will never actually exercise and rather than have an argument with a bunch of idiots, they just invented a new product and got a new revenue stream all while patting you in the head and never claiming it’s a weight loss product. You believe it is because the marketing is clever.

They say “zero calories” and your brain fills in the rest.

See, to actually lose weight you have to burn calories and the only way to actually do that in a meaningful way is to exercise. It’s the same stupid mindset from health gurus who claim eating celery is negative calories. And that is true; however, you’ll lose about 1/10 of an ounce of weight for every stick of celery.