Diet Soda Linked To Poor Health

I’m not a coffee drinker. Sometimes it makes things a bit awkward when I meet someone for coffee, other times I feel a bit prideful about it. But I have my own vice. And it’s bubbly, syrupy, caffeinated and calorie free. Diet soda is one of my favorite things in life. Naturally, the news I’m about to share is a bit disheartening.

Two new studies (not just one), presented last week at the meeting of the American Diabetes Association, have found diet soda drinkers to have inferior health to nondrinkers.

The first study, out of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, found that people who drank two or more diet sodas a day had an increase in their waist size, that was six times greater than those who didn’t drink diet soda. The second of the studies found that aspartame, a common diet soda sweetener, raised blood sugar levels in diabetes-prone mice.

So what does this mean? While diet sodas may be calorie free, they may not be consequence free. Sigh. What’s your opinion, should we cut the calories or cut the artificial sweetners?