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Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Don't want to share my life story, but I did for a time, got to about a twelve pack and a half a day of diet coke when I was 20.
My reward was not weight loss, but an a-fib. and half a life expectancy.
I don't blame the diet coke because I was the one buying and drinking it. But it is important people understand that something is wrong in that stuff.
Just as I wouldn't blame cigarettes for giving me lung cancer, but I would want others to know it can.
Apart from the aspartame, that's also like 900mg of caffeine a day, which is over twice the recommended amount, and 700mg of sodium.
Yup. what else can I say except poor self control and shortcuts are a mean combination.
I eat a lot healthier now, but that mistake isn't one that just goes away.
ADHD?
Unmedicated, I would crave soda like a fucking sugar tick. I'd eat until I was sick, then eat some more. Actually rotted a bunch of my teeth with my shitty habits and poor self-control. Needed several root canals.... ugh....
Medicated, I have soda maybe once per month or every other month. I don't have uncontrollable cravings for sugar anymore. It's fucking great!!
I think self medicating with caffeine may have been part of it. Congrats on the cutting back.
It makes people with ADHD sleepy right?
Personally it doesn't even do that, it just literally does nothing whatsoever to me.
I have popped 200mg of caffeine pills and chewed a 4mg nicotine gum and the only effect is that the gum makes me cough.
Not to defend diet coke (any kind of soda is not healthy for you, regardless), but I would generally assume that drinking 144oz (assuming 18x8oz cans/day) of any type of beverage that isn't plain old water would tend to cause some level of serious health effects, given that's more than your entire general recommended daily fluid intake from all sources. I feel like the general takeaway is that most food and drink is bad for you in excess, and companies constantly slapping "diet/low fat/low carb/etc." labels on junk food products that are marginally healthier than their peers gives a false impression that you can have your cake and eat it too in terms of negative health effects from these foods/drinks.
That's basically how I've felt about it. If you're getting too much sugar from drinking soda, the correct response is to drink less soda - not substitute the sugar with something that tricks your body into thinking it's sweet.
But this ignores that people want to drink soda, and sugar-free soda lets them do that while also not consuming vast vast vast amounts of pointless calories.
You have to balance enjoyment with health, not doing so is why most diets fail, if you force yourself into a healthy diet that makes you sad you will almost inevitably end up falling back to the junk food because it makes you happy.
People want to eat lots of fat, sugary foods but that doesn't mean they should.
Certainly, it's about balancing enjoyment with health. However I think it's important to listen to what your body is telling you, when it's telling you you're having too much of something.
Honestly not sure what your point is here, you seem to have ignored my argument and replied with a non-sequiteur.
Yeah, people should listen to their bodies, and their bodies say that they want to drink soda.
Now, is it better to drink soda with a shitload of calories, or soda with like 3 calories?
Most people have not trained themselves to pull off intuitive eating and thus their bodies just crave fats and carbs, so the best thing to do to improve their diet is to satisfy those cravings while consuming fewer calories.
This then provides an excellent motivation to re-calibrate your cravings as you realize that it is, in fact, possible to eat healthily without being miserable.
The body isn't saying it wants soda. There is no drive from the body for soda. The body might want sugar, but it's also saying it's having too much. The brain is saying it likes the taste of soda, but taste isn't nutrition.
The best thing to do to improve their diet is to improve their diet. The point is to learn that those cravings aren't right, so you can learn to identify your body's real cravings are. If you keep drinking diet soda you may be less likely to make meaningful change, at best you're delaying it.
You should absolutely blame the Diet Coke and the execs that push it. Almost every aspect of eating the food we need to live is distorted by people trying to make as much money as possible at the expense of our health. They know it. They spend billions doing it. You likely wouldn't have been consuming it or so much of it if it wasn't on every billboard and commercial and was at the back of the store in plain boxes without the big 'sale' or 'bogof' stickers. It doesn't have to be this way and you shouldn't blame yourself or any other individual for a social problem.