Been drinking exclusively (give or take) no-sugar caffeinated sodas since a child. Not obese or diabetic. Mid-thirties now. How bad is this?
Even sugar-free drinks are suspected to increase your chance of diabetes, obesity, and a wide variety of other health issues. High consumption of artifically sweetened beverages are suspected to increase your likelihood of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer, notably a large increase in cholecystectomies, which you say you’ve had.
Here’s a long review of smaller-scale studies of a variety of associations and/or suspected causations of diet soda consumption - Notably arterial disease and “remodelling”, Weight gain, Depression in later life, Eating disorders, impaired cognitive development, hip fractures, UTIs, Diabetic retinopathy, End-stage renal disease, Leukemia and lymphoma, and overall mortality. The review concluded that by objective standards, the included studies were all at least of “moderate” quality.
Need I go on?
Is a lot of that going to be correlative? For sure yeah. Is it still maybe a very good idea to incorporate more water into your diet? Also yeah.
Thanks for the links. I’ll give them a read through.
They didn’t separate artificial sweetened beverages from those with sugar in the article about gallbladder cancer. That’s sort of… important from my perspective. Cancer and gallstones are different things anyway. I’m confidant my issues were with malnutrition over my gallbladder and the problematic gallstones.
Likewise, obese people consume “diet” sodas in an attempt to diet. Even in that review it has garbage conclusions like “consumption of any type of soda”. Yea, that’s real helpful in figuring out if aspartame is a carcinogen–let’s sample people who don’t drink aspartame exclusively to collect two data-sets: those that drink water exclusively and those that drink sugar-soda exclusively. That says nothing about aspartame.
A lot of this is garbage. I hate meta-reviews. They’re always garbage.
Like, I’ve already stated I’m not obese, yet people keep bringing up obesity and sugar-related diseases. Thanks for not reading.
I was raised drinking soda as the default… water was never something we’d willingly drink. In middle school I noticed that every day I’d get home from school with a splitting headache and I’d take a couple of aspirin and wash it down with a Coke and the headache would go away. My parents realized that it was likely caffeine withdrawal… so instead of cutting out soda, they started getting me caffeine free soda.
It wasn’t until my older brother was in his late 30s and experienced kidney failure and required a transplant that I realized I needed to make a change. I switched over to water and unsweet tea as my defaults. Even after his transplant my brother still would only drink soda… he didn’t survive Covid. And today my mom routinely has kidney issues but still refuses to drink water.
Everyone in my family, except for me, has diabetes and kidney issues. I’m sure my 30+ years of daily soda drinking will catch up to me, but I do credit cutting soda out of my diet as having a major positive impact on my overall health.
Which ingredient do you attribute the kidney issues to?
It’s not so much the that drinking soda caused kidney disease as the lack of ever drinking water.
I attribute the sugar from the soda as helping to cause the diabetes though.
Not a doctor, but off the top of my head it would be more about lack of water. Water filters out lots of stuff - it’s a solvent. If you only drink coke, whether if caffeinated or not, it’s still saturated with various things. Your body can’t use that to remove all the crap that it needs to, which water usually does.
We’ve evolved to drink water.
Soda is mostly water.
Kidneys and liver hate this one trick.
I did that for a long time and regretted it.
The excess sugar will make your liver store fat as it can’t process it all fast enough. Everything else wrecks your kidneys. Eventually you get to the point where you have to start fixing things, but everything healthy for the liver is bad on the kidneys, and everything good for kidneys is bad for the liver.
For me it was the liver that got me. Luckily I caught it before it became too big a problem. More by coincidence. Fatty liver doesn’t have symptoms until it turns into cirrhosis. By then it’s too late to do anything. My dad wasn’t so lucky and now he is battling dialysis and kidney failure.
It’s ok to have sodas once and a while. After losing 90 pounds and getting into regular exercise I refuse to drink sugary drinks. But I really enjoy sugar free options, like coke zero and such. I try to limit myself to one every other day or less. For context, I used to drink at least 40oz of Mt Dew on top of one or two large energy drinks a day. Once I got started, I don’t even miss it. But oh the headaches that first week.
I’m confused why people keep bringing up sugar when OP says they drink the sugar-free ones.
The acidity from carbonated drinks is not great for your teeth tho.
Yea, I specifically noted the no-sugar content. I don’t like sweet things in general, especially food that’s majority sugar. I’m not an American. Real food exists in my country. I’ve never struggled with weight abundance, but the inverse: being too skinny. I don’t like eating. I’ve talked with doctors about this and I’m assuming it’s due to being skinny, but I get no response.
My teeth are “ok”. I’ve had one dental filling over my life. Dentists usually comment on how clean they are. None have yet to say anything negative about overall hygiene. They’re overcrowded so cosmetically they don’t look great.
Right now I’m going through 8 cans a day, or 3 liters. On days I’m not occupied, like weekends, it could be more.
I’ve also always been physically active and I continue to be.
Again, weight or excess sugar and its diseases are not relevant.
Everybody is different, could be fine could be developing issues that won’t by symptomatic until later. Best way to find out is to ask a doctor who can take a family history, run tests to see if you’re within normal ranges, ask medically relevant questions, etc.
Phosphoric acid is the bad one. It can affect kidneys.
I’m no doctor, but when I started limiting my beer in-take I drank a lot of seltzer water and I think it helped.
I personally preferred to go the snob route and only drink plain seltzer. But other people seem to like the flavored stuff, idk if that would have the same effect.
I did that. My teeth are ruined, my breath is nearly always bad. I’ve had more root canals than is responsible, and it’s been massively expensive.
Drink water and brush your teeth.
Seems like a recipe for kidney stones and a crippling caffeine dependency.
I had gallstones and my gallbladder was removed. I put that down to malnutrition though.
Sounds like you have some pretty intense diet issues going on, unfortunately.
Not the answer to your question but: Have you tried water? It’s really not that bad. Some even like it.
As for your question: Mayo clinic says “It’s not known if drinking diet soda every day is harmful. The evidence on diet soda’s health effects isn’t clear”. So no one knows, but I thank you for your contribution to this experiment. Hope it works out well.
Yea but what does a mayonaise clinic know about sprite
Yes. It tastes foul. I’m addicted to caffeine. I’ve tried to cut back over the years and I just can’t.
One of the ways I cut back was to have water sitting next to my soda for the first few months. Just have water right next to it. I would always make sure it was fresh, cold water with ice if possible. I would alternate between them so I was getting more water, but also so I could get used to the taste again.
Now, if I ever have a sweet drink, I follow it up with a glass of water after. Even if you just balance it between the two, it’s better than drinking only soda. Moderation is better than nothing at all.
How about fizzy water? (Carbonated water)
Salt always seems to be added to fizzy water. There’s probably a reason. It’s very noticeable and unpleasant. In other carbonated drinks the saltiness is masked. (All carbonated drinks seem to have salt.)
I’m not convinced drinking seltzer is any better than a no-sugar cola. One still has the concerns of carbon dioxide making bones more brittle. Issues about artificial sweeteners and over consumption of caffeine are removed, but at that point just drink water.
Water isn’t addictive, neither is seltzer, but caffeinated drinks are. This advice to just drink seltzer/water is just as helpful as telling a life-time cigarette smoker, “just suck on a stick and pretend you’re smoking”.
Have you tried various flavored waters or seltzers? Long term the caffeine addiction probably isn’t that great for you either.
You don’t have to go cold turkey, but if I were you I would try to taper down your soda consumption and see how that makes you feel. You may also be slightly dehydrated and a little water (as in flavored waters, if you can handle it) may make you feel a little better.
Tap water is genuinely terrible in some areas. Have you tried bottled water?
My family uses a water softening filter on our tap water and it makes it go from awful tasting to pretty good. We just store water in a jug after filtering and it really helps and is far cheaper than bottled water.
How do you do in summers where you need to drink liters of fluids to stay hydrated?
By drinking liters (of no-sugar) cola. Usually during heavy exercise water is the dominant drink (hot weather or not), but as a trend I always go back to an over-consumption of caffeinated, sugar-free colas.
Where people would relax and have a tea or coffee I’d drink a soda. Being idle will dramatically increase consumption though, to the point of just pissing it out. If I’m idle it means I’m at home though and pissing every 30 minutes isn’t really an issue there.
Diet Soda is essentially just flavored seltzer water with more flavor than the drinks actually labelled as flavored seltzer.
A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to understand that.
Most of the people touring horrible health risks have conflated diet sodas with sugary sodas, some have misunderstood some genuine studies on diet soda. The reason diet sodas correlate strongly with certain health conditions is primarily selection bias. Many diet soda drinkers also eat high-fat, high-sodium, US-style fast food diet, which is actually pretty hard in your body. Also Diet Soda’s sweet taste can trigger heightened insulin production, because your body expects it to be full of sugar, and that heightened insulin can cause sugar cravings, and some people then consume more sugar satisfying that craving that would have been in a regular soda anyway.
Diet Soda is not a diuretic, it hydrates you just as well as tea, seltzer, or even a slightly smaller glass of plain ol water. There’s some unanswered questions about the artificial sweeteners and their long term effects, but any of the really bad stuff they’ve found in actual studies has been at far higher concentration that a person would consume even if Diet Soda was their only fluid intake.
Ok, but water is great
Sure. But that’s not what this post is about, is it?
And water is only great if you have great water. Most of the developed world settles for “won’t make you sick” but leaves their water tasting horrible when it comes out of the pipes.
Having spent a lot of my time the last two years in the global south, I’ve got a real shocker for you. They sell bottled water. It’s cheap too.
Drink some water, dawg. Please.
How are your teeth? Also, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11501561/
More modern research is starting to explore the biochemistry involved with adverse outcomes. That being the case, people saying bad outcomes are based on lifestyle issues that go hand in hand with using sugar substitutes are behind the curve in the research.
Overall, my opinion is they are generally bad if you consume them multiple times every day, at minimum.
I have this issue as well, I drank a lot of soda since I was a kid and when I’m not drinking soda, I drink carbonated water… Managed to take a little break recently but I feel it’s coming back.
My teeth are ok, nothing major. I’m slightly overweight, but that’s more due to the anti-depressant I’m taking.
Yea. After being prescribed lisdexamfetamine I’ve begun to gain weight and I need to reassess what I’m consuming. I feel I need to provide context for people who aren’t reading the entire post: gain-weight doesn’t mean obesity. In this context it means not being skin and bones.
I’ve likewise taken breaks, but always relapse. Even after that period of caffeine withdrawal ends you don’t feel any ‘healthier’. During that period I will vomit. Once that’s all settled you’re annoyed, because you feel the same, only know you have a nagging thought that doesn’t go away: I want caffeine.
Not a doctor or anything, but I imagine it could be this bad: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwan-hospital-removes-over-300-kidney-stones-from-woman-who-prefers-bubble-tea-to-plain-water
