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Diet Soda - Should I Drink It Or Flush It?

By Cate Moon

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 14Jul2009 Word count: 485 Viewed: 320 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

It's very laudable that many of us wanting to lose weight look for alternatives to sugar-laden soft drinks. Obviously, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi are very high profile solutions. But are they?

On a psychological level, the fact that we're drinking zero calorie soda encourages us to actually eat more. "Big Mac with large fries, apple pie and a Diet Coke please." Come on now, admit it. You've done it haven't you? Yes, me too!

Diet soda is not the drink to choose if you want to lose weight. It is actually more likely to make you put on weight! Diet soda, because of its caffeine content, can also help to deplete your potassium levels. So, it's really not a good idea to drink this stuff.

But there's another, much more sinister reason that we should all stop buying diet soda and that reason is additives; two in particular, Aspartame and Acesulfame K.

Let's look at Aspartame first. It contains methanol. The Material Safety Data Sheet for methanol states that it is toxic, may be a reproductive hazard, ingestion may be fatal, risk of very serious, irreversible damage if swallowed, exposure may cause eye, kidney, heart, and liver damage, chronic or substantial acute exposure may cause serious eye damage, irritant and narcotic.

Symptoms of aspartame poisoning include depression, anxiety attacks, headaches, dizziness, vertigo, muscle spasms, cramps, shooting pains etc. So, if you suffer from any of these symptoms and you regularly drink diet soda...

Aspartame, when used alone to 'sweeten' soft drinks, leaves an aftertaste just like many sugar substitutes. So, to counteract this affect, those wonderful food scientists include another additive; Acesulfame K to mask the aftertaste. It has been reported that Acesulfame K, when tested on animals, produced lung and breast cancers and leukaemia.

What a cocktail; aspartame with a dash of Acesulfame K! Not only do we drink it, we actually feed these chemicals to our children.

It is never a good idea to regularly partake of 'artificial' foods, but diet sodas are really, really not a good idea because of the wide range of health problems they produce. The good news is that there is a cure: stop using diet soda and sugar substitutes and replace the sweetness with unrefined, raw sugar. I prefer molasses sugar but there is a whole range to suit most tastes.

Here is a list of the main foodstuffs that contain aspartame. The list is not complete (there are 1000s of products containing aspartame and 1000s more in the pipeline) so, when all else fails, read the label. You'll soon find the products to leave on the shelf.

Foods containing aspartame: Soft drinks especially those labelled 'diet', 'light' or 'lite', almost everything labelled 'sugar-free' and 'no added sugar' such as gelatine, chocolate syrup, biscuits, ketchup, yoghurt, plus chewing gum, some sugar replacement sweeteners, meal replacement diet aids, nutritional bars and drinks, fruit spreads, jams and jellies

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