Diet soda makes you gain weight, look old and wrinkly

Diet soda, it turns out, may not be the panacea for weight loss that we all thought — and many of us hoped — it was.

In fact, a Purdue University study has found that diet sodas may be linked to a number of health problems from obesity to diabetes to heart disease, just like their more sugary counterparts.

Susie Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences and a behavioral neuroscientist, reviewed a number of recent studies looking at whether drinking diet soft drinks over the long-term increases the likelihood that a person will overeat, gain weight and then develop other health problems.

A new 14-year study of 66,118 women (sup­ported by many other pre­vi­ous stud­ies) found that the oppo­site seems to be true. Diet drinks may be worse than sugar-sweetened drinks, which are worse than fruit juices (but only fresh-squeezed fruit juices).

The study, pub­lished in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, dis­cov­ered some fright­en­ing facts that should make us all swear off diet drinks and products.

1. Diet sodas raised the risk of dia­betes more than sugar-sweetened sodas!
2. Women who drank one 12-ounce diet soda had a 33 per­cent increased risk of Type 2 dia­betes, and women who drank one 20-ounce soda had a 66 per­cent increased risk.
3. Women who drank diet sodas drank twice as much as those who drank sugar-sweetened sodas because arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers are more addic­tive and are hun­dreds to thou­sands of times sweeter than reg­u­lar sugar.
4. The aver­age diet soda drinker con­sumes three diet drinks a day.

You might say that peo­ple who are over­weight and just about to get dia­betes drink more diet soda, but they sci­en­tif­i­cally con­trolled for body weight. And they found the arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers increased dia­betes inde­pen­dent of body weight!