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
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.
>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.
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
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
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).
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