Do diet soft drinks make us fat?

No calories, no sugar but lots of bubbles and an amazing sweet taste – too good to be true? Maybe so……….Artificial sweeteners; aspartame, saccharin and sucralose are among some of the varieties that have been used for a number of years to make some of our favourite sweet foods including soft drink, desserts, jelly and yoghurt taste up to 200x sweeter than their sugar based alternative for 0 calories
Regularly I see people who drink numerous “diet” soft drinks each day – hence getting the sweet hit they are looking for without any negative health consequences. Often, these same people struggle with weight loss. You may be interested to know that one of the first changes I suggest they make to their diet in an attempt to get their weight under control once and for all is eliminate all artificially sweetened product. Why?

There is growing evidence to show that it is in fact possible to be “addicted” to sweet foods. Programming the brain to constantly look for exceptionally sweet food whether it is cake, lollies or diet soft drink appears to disrupt the body’s natural hunger and fullness signals for a number a reasons. Here are two major ones.

1. telling the body you are getting glucose(energy) but then telling it is not,
2. programming the brain to seek exceptionally sweet stimulus and finally exposing the body to intensely sweet flavour and taste sensations when we perhaps should not be receiving any stimulus at all, even though we think 0 calories is all that matters.

So, if you constantly consume diet soft drink – start to wean off and replace it with water, green tea or black tea.

Observe how much more in control of your food cravings you are, and the way you begin to feel hunger and fullness again – it may be the best thing you could ever do for your weight, your diet and your taste buds.