The truth about diet drinks
CP+R Sciencecast | Edition #148
Wednesday 3rd January 2024
“Diet drinks can’t be good for you, surely?!..”
…is often what you’ll hear people say and, as always with nutrition and health, theories and opinions far outstrip the scientific evidence, and individual context is actually really important.
Here are a few of the debated topics:
1: Diet drinks make you addicted to sugar
The evidence for this is very mixed. The majority of studies suggest that diet drinks can actually satisfy desires for sweets rather than enhance them but it may well be that responses are highly variable, so this is one for individual investigation.
2: Diet drinks impact hormones
It’s sometimes suggested that artificial sweeteners ‘trick’ your body into thinking sugar is coming and therefore your insulin levels spike, which can impact blood sugar control and weight loss. There is some truth in this, however, the increases in insulin are so small and so transient that they have very little to no clinical significance and studies have shown no significant effect on glycaemic control and impaired weight loss.
3: Diet drinks impact your microbiome
This is the newest area of research, and you guessed it, it’s mainly based on animal studies. As with the above there may be a small effect, however, it’s likely to pale into insignificance against other factors that also impact the gut microbiome, such as eating a wide variety of plants (veg, beans etc).
4: Diet drinks cause cancer
There was a study in the 1970s showing a link between artificial sweeteners and cancer in rats, however, you’d need to drink 800 cans of Coke to reach those dangerous levels, also significantly, that specific sweetener is not used in diet drinks today. There’s widespread agreement that in reasonable amounts there’s no good evidence to link drinks to cancer.
“Artifical Sweeteners – Health Impacts and ‘Safe’ Levels”from Sigma Nutrition Radio
“There is now widespread use of various “artificial sweeteners” in foods and beverages. Most commonly non-nutritive sweeteners are used to sweeten a products, whilst having less sugar and calories than a traditionally sugar-sweetened version of that product. For example, diet drinks (e.g. diet soda) are most commonly associated with artificial sweeteners. However, they are also in a wide variety of food products and supplements.
For a long-time there has been scepticism and alarm raised about their potential health effects. From claims of them increasing our food intake, all the way to causing cancer. And food safety authorities have conducted rigorous examinations of the safety data on each of these compounds.
In this episode, the Sigma team discuss the initial research that raised alarm bells, the current process of safety evaluation for non-nutritive sweeteners, the amounts they are consumed in, and the studies published thus far examining their health impacts.”
How much can I drink?
Guidelines for ‘safe’ levels of artificial sweeteners add up to the equivalent of about 19 cans of diet drink (not that I’m recommending anywhere near that amount).
How much should I drink?
There are no known health benefits to drinking diet drinks except if they’re used in replacement of full sugar alternatives so you don’t need to drink any.
TAKE-HOMES:
Diet drinks probably get an unfair wrap when it comes to health. In the quantities you might drink (let’s say, 1-a-week) them in it’s very unlikely that they’ll cause harm to health so if you’re drinking the odd can in replacement of a full sugar version, or indeed if you just enjoy the taste, then the health implications will be negligible.
A final note, the average can contains approximately ½ the amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee so bear this in mind as a factor if you’re working on your sleep.
Thanks for reading!
Matt Thompson
Head of Cardiac Exercise
