Er, this whole topic can be a little misleading. I haven't found a single reputable study that claims diet soda itself causes weight gain. Rather, just as the reasoning in this article suggests, the only scientific fact they present is that the consumption of diet soda itself does not encourage weight loss.
Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.
It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.
Yet you have things like this:
"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"
This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.
So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.
Very misleading. In fact, the author of this study is a behavioral neurologist, hence studying human behavior relating to diet drinks rather than diet drinks themselves. Drink as much diet soda as you like, if the rest of your diet is healthy then you're fine. This article is just typical fear-mongering against artificial sweeteners, I'm surprised it got up voted here.
Yes, because being sceptical of substances that get approved after some hasty testing, with big push from a few large multinationals is "batshit insane".
The sceptic thing is to thing scientists are above human and infallible. And to ignore tons of precedents of BS substances and drugs being brough to the market, only to be recalled a few years or even a few decades later.
Because "science" is a magic word, that somehow overcomes systemic problems in how burecreacies work, how people (including whole teams) react to money, and how judgements can be wrong. To suggest otherwise is "batshit insane".
After all, those doing the safety testing can take their sweet time to study long term results, aren't ever lured by money, and understand all possible effects of the substances they approve equally well as the collective scientific community understands non artificial substances used for centuries or millenia, right?
>Very misleading. In fact, the author of this study is a behavioral neurologist, hence studying human behavior relating to diet drinks rather than diet drinks themselves. Drink as much diet soda as you like, if the rest of your diet is healthy then you're fine.
Only people are not Vulcans -- to seperate such things as easy as you put it. For example, who told you that, from a behavioral standpoint, drinking diet soda and having a healthy diet are compatible?
If anything, the "behavioral neurologist" suggests otherwise.
Your idea that diet soda is totally OK (which btw, needs a citation), is based on the premise that people can easily do the healthy diet and still consume diet soda. Which might be true for some, but clearly does not work for most -- not because it is physically impossible, but because other factors (e.g behavioral, psychological, etc) are also into play. Dismissing those as irrelevant does a huge disservice to studying the matter.
"Diet" and "weight loss" are often used interchangeably, sure, but can you think of any instances in which diet Pepsi or diet Coke has been advertised as actually causing weight loss (ie; the product itself is a weight loss supplement)?
I think the name "diet soda" needs to go, as it really is misleading, but (and I could be wrong about this) I don't think these companies have ever claimed their products make you shed pounds by simply drinking them.
Diet definition 3 from Merriam Webster: "the kind and amount of food prescribed for a person or animal for a special reason"
(by the way: who the hell thought it was good idea to put on your dictionary site a ad for wallmart with sound, and REALLY LOUD sound, that plays automatically?)
Diet products were intended, and advertised, as sugar-free stuff, for people that need sugar-free dietary needs (ie: diabetics mostly)
It was the weight loss desperate people that figured that it might result in weight loss and generated lots of confusion.
Here in Brazil the government even passed a law, that to market anything as "diet" the requeriment is that it has 0% sugar, for safety of diabetics. And whoever decides to sue a company because their "diet" product has more calories or more fat for example, is their problem, because "diet" was not meant for that.
>Diet products were intended, and advertised, as sugar-free stuff, for people that need sugar-free dietary needs (ie: diabetics mostly)
Nope, they were advertised as the "healthy" choices for people that care about their sillouette. This is obvious from their advertising (not to mention that they also say it explicitly in ads).
Oh, and diet coke in Europe is code "coca cola LIGHT".
So much for the dietary connotation.
(And, yes, people do NOT know the meaning of diet. The majority understands it only in the sense of "weight loss diet").
The best line from the article was the opening one:
"Diet soda, it turns out, may not be the panacea for weight loss that we all thought — and many of us hoped — it was."
It would make a very nice lead in to an Onion article.
I think what's misleading is not the guidance of this article: but rather the idea that calories are calories.
We've been told calories are calories are calories so many times.
BUT
Calories are clearly not treated the same way by different people: two people can eat the same thing, and live the same lifestyle, and one will be overweight. Should we really assume that the same notion can't apply to an individual who treats themselves differently?
What's the elephant in the room? Metabolism!! And whether your body wants to store weight.
What you eat affects both metabolism and whether your body wants to store weight. Sure, everyone's going to be require their own unique mix.
BUT the important point is that what you eat has reflexive impact on how your body uses what you eat and thus on whether you'll be overweight.
So calories are not the only thing. And thus it's entirely possible that a calorie-free substance, which has impacts on metabolism and how your body decides what to store, can impact weight gain.
Research has shown metabolism doesn't have the affect on weight loss as many believe it to have. Case in point, weight loss can be achieved eating 1 big meal a day vs. 6 smaller meals a day (where the latter is often hyped b/c it "revs" your metabolism). Your body adjusts.
The true formula for weight loss is simple and well understood: consume less calories than your body requires. When you create a caloric deficit, you'll drop weight, certainly. Focusing on metabolism is a red herring.
What's more, is that your body doesn't care how the deficit is achieved. I'm eating fast food, sweets, and consuming diet soda more often then when I was a "healthy" eater ... you wouldn't guess that I've since dropped 30 lbs. All while getting stronger, and only eating 1 - 2 meals a day. Who cares what my metabolism is, or what I'm eating? The bottom line is that I'm consuming amounts that adhere to a caloric deficit, so I'm leaning down.
So for weight loss, how much you eat will always trump what you eat. Consuming more calories than your body needs will always lead to weight gain, even if they're "clean" calories that come from lean meats and veggies.
I'd encourage you to read Eat Stop Eat: http://www.eatstopeat.com/ (warning, the site looks spammy, but you won't be dissatisfied w/the book)
It's a great read on intermittent fasting that presents a lot of research that debunks metabolism and other hype factors the fitness industry relies on to complicate how simple weight loss really is.
Newbie question: I find zero-fat food that is very high in protein and reasonable in sugar. Such food also is high on calories. Is food with 230 calories (zero from fat) the same as 230 calories (120 from fat, zero grams protein) in terms of weight loss? I am avoiding the latter, do I need to avoid the former too?
If you want to lose weight, the type of calories don't matter as much as quantity. So in regard to the 2 230 calorie amounts you've cited, they'll both contribute to weight loss, or weight gain, equally, depending on what side of a daily or weekly caloric budget they land on.
Consider this:
A popular belief is that 1 lb. of fat contains about 3500 calories. [1] By that measure, and assuming you regularly eat at maintenance calorie level each week, eating 3500 calories below what will result in about a 1 lb. reduction in body weight that week. (which realistically turns out to be mostly fat, but can also include small amounts of lean muscle, too).
Whether you create that deficit from removing sugar, fat, carbs, or protien doesn't matter.
But that's solely for weight loss. When you simultaneously want to increase lean muscle, exercise and protein become more important. Also consider medical conditions that require adhering to certain diet regimen.
So I'm not saying that, globally, what you eat doesn't matter, only that weight loss primarily comes down to maintaining a caloric deficit. To supplement, of all the diet programs out there ... Atkins, South Beach, and even intermittent fasting ... the one thing they all have in common is that they promote a caloric deficit, somehow. And they have to, other wise they wouldn't work!
[1] Some argue the 3500 calories = 1 lb. of fat is bs. All I can say is that I've based my caloric deficit on it and it seems to hold true. I dropped my weekly caloric budget by 7k calories, and have been losing about 2 lbs. a week.
This helps. This understanding is what I was looking for. Thanks!
Seems to fit my case too. I am cutting down by about 400-600 calories per day and have been loosing at about 4-5 lb per month. I am intending to loose another 10 lb while building some muscle, and got confused by some articles I came across online which talked about increasing protein intake significantly.
Your body does not digest fat and turn you into fat, just like it does not digest broccoli and turn you into broccoli. Whats actually important is carbs vs protein. You wan't to eat things that are high in protein and low in carbs, theres many schools of thought that say fat doesn't matter at all anymore. You can learn more by searching for Paleo and Ketosis on Google or Reddit. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or dietitian just sharing whats worked for me.
Oh! My understanding so far was that fat gets stored in the body as long-term energy reserve while sugars form short-term energy reserve. Proteins on the other hand make up the muscle mass. So what I have been trying for the last two months is to force my body to eliminate excess fat deposits by practically eliminating fat intake, reducing sugar intake to make the body low on energy and start digesting the fat reserves, and finally also augmenting proteins (with exercise) to build muscle mass.
Are you suggesting that I can continue to consume fat, as far as I do not increase my calorie intake (say by cutting down on carbs correspondingly)?
I'll read the reference as time permits. Thanks for the same.
I don't doubt it's a great book, but the first sentence defies your claim that metabolism is a red herring unless you're saying this guy is selling red herrings:
>Clinical Research Proves that Eat Stop Eat will Help You Lose Weight Fast, Get Rid of Ugly Body Fat and Increase Growth Hormone in as Little as 24 Hours - all while Improving Your Metabolism and Even Building Lean Muscle
Having read his book, I can say that he's not selling red herrings.
He does make a clear, recurring, point in his book: the fitness and diet industry focuses too much on things that don't matter that much. E.g. low carb diets, avoiding "bad foods", cardio being the key to fat loss, and yes, metabolism.
My belief is that he mentions metabolism on his site to arouse curiosity, or calm worries, on one myth that fasting skeptics have: not eating frequently slows your metabolism, and to the point that it affects weight loss.
In fact, fasting doesn't affect your metabolism that much, if at all. Research shows it stays pretty steady during periods of fasting.
And through that fact, he's able to push your focus away from worrying about metabolism and on to what really matters: calorie consumption.
The stuff I've seen says that metabolism can only account for about 300 kcal/day difference, until you get into extreme cases like "starvation mode" where the body starts to shutdown (women's periods stop, etc). In the end there's no way around the first law of thermodynamics.
Most anecdotes about "but he eats the same stuff I do!" are just the extremely common cases of people under and overestimating caloric value.
"In the end there's no way around the first law of thermodynamics."
The first law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system, and doesn't automatically have much of anything to do with whether something as complex as a body stores fat or not.
I agree that calories can have different impacts on people. We all require a certain intake of calories to achieve a certain weight or build. There are a lot of different variables that make this happen, such as exercise, lifestyle, genetics, and so on.
But where is the evidence that a calorie-free beverage can have an impact on your metabolism? You're eliminating the idea of calories entirely with diet soda, so I don't see how your argument stands any ground.
Bob eats more calories than Bob burns. Bob gains weight.
Ann eats more calories than Ann burns. Ann gains weight.
You can make a rough comparison between Ann and Bob - they eat extra calories, they gain weight.
There are some bugs that help people gain weight; there are some bugs that help people not gain weight. People do different amounts of exercise. People are lousy at recalling what they actually eat everyday. But, really, calories are calories.
> And thus it's entirely possible that a calorie-free substance, which has impacts on metabolism and how your body decides what to store, can impact weight gain.
I disagree, and I'd like some credible references. Unless you're talking about amphetamine sulphate.
> > And thus it's entirely possible that a calorie-free substance, which has impacts on metabolism and how your body decides what to store, can impact weight gain.
> I disagree, and I'd like some credible referenceys. Unless you're talking about amphetamine sulphate.
This seems self-defeating. Surely, for a claim that a particular substance has a particular effect, I would like to see evidence. But obviously the notion that a substance could have such an effect is well supported by the existence of amphetamine sulphate - and unless you believe amphetamine sulphate is imbued with some magical uniqueness, other substances may very well have greater or lesser effects in the same domain (though greater effects we'd probably have noticed and tested and have conclusive evidence for by this point).
Summary: Fat, unhealthy people drink diet soda. We don't know if it's correlation or causation. Lots of people have different theories, but they're all over the map.
Reading articles like this in news media sources is so frustrating since they only ask questions and never answer any of them.
Isn't the point of diet soda to reduce the amount of sugar you consume while not having to actually give up soda? Who died and said Diet Coke would make you lose weight?
You don't need a study to know that none of the Soda drinks are of any help to any humans. Humans lived without soda for very long time until someone invented Pepsis and Cokes and .... and they are not something you use to help yourself for anything. So why bother?
Your post could be paraphrased as "It's obvious X isn't helpful because X isn't ancient and X isn't helpful. Why do people do/use X?"
Please use better logic. Also, fetishizing ancient things is an impediment to progress.
The long term survival of the human species in the presence of something is (weak) evidence that the thing isn't harmful, but the logical inversion isn't true. That is, the survival of the human species for a long time without something is neither a valid argument for nor against that thing's benefit.
Using or not using a so-called useless thing is not a question of human survival. Humans are consuming soda and it has been proven that it isn't HELPFUL. So the question is really about the continuous waste of time, resources and energy (in producing and consuming) versus that of the intent behind all these (time, resources and energy).
Unless of course you believe that producing/consuming Soda is HELPFUL in a sense that it is helpful towards economy (someone's making and people are consuming it). In this case, I have no argument here because the intent is clear enough.
As far as I know, the US is the only country where sugar-free soda is referred to as "diet".
The notion that it would help lose weight is totally new to me, I'm presuming that is because most countries outside the US would never allow it to be marketed that way.
It seems like for reduced calorie Coke specifically, it is marketed as "Diet Coke" or "Diet Coca Cola", in at least Australia[1], New Zealand[2], The United Kingdom[3], India, Israel and The US[4].
It's called diet here in Canada as well. In any case, diet does not and has never meant "lose weight". If you pay any attention to what you consume, you are "on a diet".
One of five possible definitions includes losing weight in no universe means that diet means "lose weight" -- you don't get to choose what Diet means on a can of soda.
Diet is nothing more than the things you eat, and a "diet" can be to lose, gain, maintain weight, or simply to pay attention to what you eat for the purposes of healthy eating. A diet soda is a soda modified to reduce/eliminate sugar, which again is in no way manifestly correlated with losing weight.
You're saying the body makes analogous supply and demand decisions about energy balance that Subway management makes when setting up their supply chain? Please elaborate, because this is either a deep insight beyond my understanding or else shallow and simplistic. I hope it's the former.
People are in general far too trusting of commercial labels like "diet" and "fresh" when they should be making healthy choices about their companies they buy from instead of the products.
Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.
It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.
Yet you have things like this:
"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"
This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.
So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.