Could Diet Soda be making you Fat?

Work hard, play by the rules, and you can be anything you want to be. This is American Dream, sewn into our souls as a fundamental truism. Do the right thing, do it with diligence, and you will succeed.

There’s a dietary version of this dream that we hold to just as implicitly. Eat the right thing, keep your “calories in” less than your “calories out”, and you will succeed in holding your weight down. But somehow, the only thing that has upward mobility lately seems to be our national obesity problems.

The American Dietary Dream has been frustrated somewhere, and diet sodas make the point. These zero calorie drinks, if the theory is correct, should not contribute to your overall weight. And yet two major studies have both contradicted this assumption.

In the massive Nurse’s Health Study, researchers at Harvard followed the detailed dietary patterns of tens of thousands of nurses since the 1970s. The scientists looked to see whether those who drank regular soda (at least one per day) gained weight. To no one’s surprise, these sugary drinks were linked to weight gain over time – the nurses were about twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as well.

The very same result was confirmed in the San Antonio Heart Study. After reviewing 26 years of patient data, they found that every can of diet soda a person drank made you 65% more likely to become overweight and 41% more likely to become obese!

So, if diet soda consumption increases the risk of becoming overweight or obese even more than regular soda, this particular dietary dream turns out to be an unhappy one. Perhaps what we need is another way of thinking about our weight that doesn’t lead us to drink drinks that make the problem worse. Perhaps the “calories in, calories out” dream was … just that.

After all, anyone who has struggled with their weight can tell you that calorie/carb/point accounting may work fine in principle, but is really difficult in practice. Perhaps a more reliable idea would be to return to the principles that actually have worked to keep us thin and healthy in the past. The first of these principles is to “Eat Food”.

Of course there are many more components to living a healthy life, but if you start with this rule, at least you won’t have to wait for another study to tell you faux foods and faux drinks (diet sodas) are associated with a raft of health problems. That’s because you won’t be drinking them anyway – and that is a good dream to wake up from.