…or not, as recently revealed by A Doctor:
A Harvard and Stanford trained gastroenterologist has revealed four scary facts about diet soda — and why you may not want to drink them anymore.
I’ll spare you the need to click on the link. Diet pops (Diet Coke, -Pepsi, whatever) mess with the following:
- Heart
- Kidneys
- Gut biome
- and make you crave chocolate (or something like that)
Of course, they all taste like shit, without exception, so there’s also that. In my experience, people who claim the opposite have generally been drinking them for an extended period — i.e. their taste buds have become accustomed to that battery acid tang. I tried a couple of them, many years ago, and found that they made me thirstier than I was before drinking them.
For those who read John Sandford’s Prey novels, this will come as Bad News to ace detective Lucas Davenport, who seemingly chugs a Diet Coke with every meal. Then again, he also drinks that foul Leinenkugel beer, so his taste in drinks is questionable at best.
Kicked the diet soda several years ago, replacing it with iced tea. Black tea aggravated my gout, so I went with those Celestial Seasonings fruit-flavored teas, YMMV. Caffeine-free, and a quart of iced tea runs me about 18 cents, vs nearly $3 for a 2-liter bottle of soda. Sometimes I splurge on non-diet soda, but only to use as a cocktail mixer.
I stopped drinking soft drinks cold turkey almost 15 years ago and don’t miss them. I tried a Coke a year ago and couldn’t get past the amount of carbonation burn – it was intolerable. So I only had a few sips, dumped the rest down the drain. The flavor was unidentifiable. The stuff is truly poison.
You wrote something about Sandford a few years ago and caused compulsive, book buying, reading and re-reading. Your taste in music makes my teeth itch but your taste in fiction is fantastic.
Any other recommendations?
First off TikTok. Some twits will say ANYTHING to get views on TikTok.
Secondly “Doctors” are more like mechanics than engineers or scientists. Most of them have the same understanding of statistics that your average college sophomore does.
Many of them do EXACTLY what the Daily Mail reports this doctor did. Read a synopsis of some cherry picked studies by a group with an agenda, then repeat it.
“Diet Sodas” are a large class of drinks with very different sweeteners in them ranging from fully synthethic to stuff that is pretty much as natural as table sugar that is just as (or more) sweet, but with fewer calories.
And finally saying things like “women who drink two or more diet sodas daily face a significantly higher risk of heart attack and stroke” *completely ignores* that a lot of people who drink diet sodas do so *to lose weight*. And what is the number one correlate with heart attack or stroke? Obesity. It also doesn’t tell you what the comparison group is. Women who don’t drink soda at all? Women who drinking two or more *regular* sodas a day? All other women?
And yeah, most of the artificial sweeteners taste “off”.
I mostly drink unsweetened drinks (black coffee, black tea) or lightly flavored carbonated water.
> Of course, they all taste like shit, without exception
Many things adults drink taste like s*t on first taste. Give a 10 year old who’s never had anything but juice and water a black coffee or a black tea. Most people don’t really like the taste of *beer*, they only drink (in their teens or early 20s) because everyone else is, or to get drunk. Then they get used to the taste. Bourbon, Scotch the same way.
Hell, the British started adding quinine to their Gin to make it more palatable.
“Hell, the British started adding quinine to their Gin to make it more palatable.”
I heard it was they added Gin to their quinine because that’s the only way their troopers would take their mandated quinine.
That was a joke.
And in six months they’ll publish something about how much better diet sodas are than something else.
In the meantime, Joe Jackson is right: everything gives you cancer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbgXOkyF09M
Any time I can get a Blenheim #5 Ginger Ale, I will. My bonus son was in NC last month and brought me back a case, which should last me about a year.
Otherwise, I’m not a soda drinker at all, of any variety. I used to like a good quality root beer, but I can’t find anything these days that isn’t over sugared and full of chemicals (Sprecher’s being the exception but I’ll NEVER pay $9 for a quart of root beer).