Is
Drinking Diet Soda Worth Increasing Your Stroke Risk?
Diet soda is often perceived as
being "healthier" than regular soft drinks because it contains
artificial sweeteners in lieu of sugar, and therefore has no calories. Sugar,
and particularly the sugar often used to sweeten regular soda, is clearly
something you need to limit for optimal health. In fact, before you reach for
another can, you might want to get up to speed on the latest research, which
shows that drinking diet soda results in an increased risk of vascular events
such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.
Diet
soda can be addictive, so if you need incentive and
motivation to quit this habit, ask yourself whether the pleasure you get from
drinking it is worth having a stroke. This is a very real scenario, as
researchers found that people who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent
more likely to have suffered a vascular event, including a stroke. This
significant association persisted even after controlling for other factors that
could increase the risk, such as smoking, physical activity levels, alcohol
consumption, diabetes, heart disease, dietary factors and more.
According to the authors:
"This study suggests that diet
soda is not an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages, and may be
associated with a greater risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, or vascular
death than regular soda."
Vascular events like strokes and
heart attacks typically occur suddenly without any warning, which is why prevention
is so important. I like to refer to the most common type of stroke as a brain
attack, which is similar to a heart attack; the only difference is that the
blood clot blocks blood flow to your brain instead of your heart. As a result,
brain cells begin to die. Naturally, the longer your brain goes without oxygen,
the greater your risk of lasting brain damage.
In order to be effective, you typically
need to get treated within one hour. This is clearly one of the miracles of
modern science, however it all goes to waste if you do not address the
underlying conditions after the stroke. Again, prevention is your best option,
and research is now suggesting that eliminating diet sodas may be an important
way to dramatically reduce your stroke risk. Up to 80 percent of strokes are
preventable by making lifestyle modifications; this includes not only diet but
also optimizing your vitamin D levels, as research recently found that people
who got less than the midpoint level of sun exposure were at a 60 percent
increased risk for stroke.
Need Even More Incentive to Ditch
Diet Soda? It Can Make You Fat!
If potentially lowering your risk of
heart attack and stroke doesn't spur you to ditch this dangerous habit, maybe
the fact that diet soda will make you fat will. A study by researchers at the
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, presented at the
2011 meeting of the American Diabetes Association, followed 474 diet soda
drinkers for nearly 10 years. They found that their waists grew 70 percent
larger than the waists of non-diet soda drinkers. Furthermore, those who drank
two or more diet sodas a day had a 500 percent greater increase in waist size!
A second study by some of the same researchers also revealed that mice eating
food laced with the artificial sweetener aspartame had higher blood sugar
levels than mice eating food without it, which suggests it may increase your
risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome. In a statement, the researchers noted:
"These results are consistent
with data from community-based epidemiologic studies in which the consumption
of diet sodas was shown to be associated with increased incidence of metabolic
syndrome and diabetes. They suggest that aspartame exposure may in fact
directly contribute to increased blood glucose levels, and thus may contribute
to the associations observed between diet soda consumption and the risk of
diabetes in humans."
Artificial sweeteners also tend to
trigger enhanced activity within your brain's pleasure centers, yet at the same
time providing less actual satisfaction. This separation of the taste of
sweetness from caloric content means that when you consume artificial
sweeteners, your brain actually craves more of it because your body is not
satisfied at a cellular level by the sugar imposter! This can actually
contribute to overeating and weight gain. To best protect your health, ditch
the sodas all together and grab some water the next time you need to quench
your thirst.
In Health,
Dr. Brad Niewierowski
REFERENCES
- i Journal of General Internal Medicine January 27, 2012
- ii Study presented at the meeting of the American
Diabetes Association, San Diego, California, June 26, 2011
- iii Study presented at the meeting of the American
Diabetes Association, San Diego, California, June 26, 2011
- iv Study presented at the meeting of the American
Diabetes Association in San Diego, 2005
- v Study presented at the American Stroke Association's
International Stroke Conference in New Orleans, February 2012
- vi Neurology March 4, 2008 vol. 70 no. 10
788-794
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