Context: I very rarely drink plain water; for some reason I find myself rarely feeling dehydrated at all. My general daily routine is to drink one can of monster ultra energy when i start my work day, and another when i get home from work. They contain no sugar, no calories and only 120mg caffeine, meaning the two cans still keeps me well under my daily caffeine intake limit. However, a lot of days I also don’t drink much else. People keep telling me this is bad for me, but I’m not sure how it’s any worse than people who pretty much only drink coffee?
In: Biology
It isn’t worse for you – people are just skeptical because they find long chemical words worrying.
There was a huge scare with aspartame a while back. It’s one of the most common sweeteners used in sugar free drinks, is 200 times more potent and far lower in calories than sugar. Hundreds of studies are out there saying that that while it isn’t *good* for your health, it is better than sugar.
So why were people so scared? I can almost guarantee you that on the back of your diet Monster the words “contains a source of phenylalanine” are written in bold, and when things are written in bold people stress that it poses a health risk and it does – to a very select number of people who suffer from PKU, a rare disorder relating to abnormally high amino acid levels. The fact of the matter is that phenylalanine is naturally occurring in low quantities in a lot of the food you consume.
It is so much better for you to be drinking diet than it is to drink that sugary crap. You’d need to drink almost 20 cans of Diet Coke to reach the recommended daily health limit and only 7 normal Coca-Colas to be pushing on incredibly unhealthy. Stay on diet!
My biggest fear would be that you’re not taking in enough fluids but if you aren’t experiencing dehydration you’re probably fine. Don’t let anyone convince you that you’re doing worse than a person who only drinks coffee. Besides, black coffee tastes like dirt anyway, better to drink something that tastes nice!
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