*This article was written by Ashley Dance.

In this day and age, nearly everyone in America knows that sodas are bad for them, especially the diet ones. The problem is that they don’t know exactly why it is unhealthy, so they drink them anyway. Not anymore! Read on to be enlightened.

Let’s first list the ingredients in Diet Coke: Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine, Aspartame (NutraSweet), Potassium Benzoate and Citric acid.

In America, most of the phosphoric acid produced (about 80%) is used in the production of agricultural fertilizers, with the remainder being used for detergent additives (about 10%), cleaners, insecticide production, and cattle feed additives. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not consume a chemical used in cleaners and fertilizers. It also inhibits calcium absorption in the body, which can be extremely detrimental to middle-age women who are already experiencing bone loss.

Potassium Benzoate is a preservative. Who knows what those “natural flavors” are either!

Next up is the caffeine. Caffeine is addictive and many Americans openly admit to being addicted to it. It is also a diuretic. That along with the sodium in diet drinks actually dehydrates you rather than quenching your thirst. Dr. Harris Stratyner said in an article on the ABC news website, “People do indeed become addicted to caffeine very rapidly, and they also withdraw from caffeine very rapidly. It can make their sleep patterns disturbed; it can make them restless, wired and anxious.”

The ingredient that is the most dangerous, however, is aspartame. Aspartame is unstable and breaks down in the can. It decomposes into formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, formic acid, diketopiperazine and other toxins. Formaldehyde, the same chemical that is used to preserve dead bodies, binds to fat cells, actually making it harder to lose weight. Aspartame also inhibits the production of serotonin, which could potentially cause depression. Ralph Walton, MD of Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, believes aspartame inhibits serotonin synthesis by decreasing the availability of the precursor L-tryptophan, a finding borne out in another research team’s 1987 experiment on rats, as reported in an article by John McManamy.

In addition, the sweet flavor of the aspartame elicits an insulin response. The body expects sugar in the bloodstream, and it isn‚Äôt there. The insulin blocks the fat burning hormone HSL (hormone sensitive lipase). Instead of using those fats as fuel, the body will begin to pull amino acids from muscles, which is more taxing on the body and can leave you feeling tired, cranky and sluggish after awhile. Armen Hareyan reports that Professor Terry Davidson and associate professor Susan Withers at Purdue University found that artificial sweeteners disrupt satiety, the feeling of being full. Their results, published in International Journal of Obesity showed that “mouth feel” plays a crucial role in the body’s ability to count calories and that when we consume artificial sweeteners we disrupt the body’s ability to count calories based on sweetness. This can cause you to inadvertently crave more food, often more sugary food, and you will eat more than you would normally if you didn‚Äôt drink that Diet Coke. This has been confirmed in a study conducted on rats at Purdue University. Davidson and Withers found that rats that were fed artificial sweeteners consistently ate more than the group fed high-calorie sweeteners. Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP writes in her article called, ‚ÄúDiet soda-How healthy is it?‚Äù that Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio have compiled data that provided surprising results. Fowler found that for each can of diet soft drink consumed per day, the risk of obesity went up by 41%.

When you drink a diet soda, it is true that you are not consuming any calories in that beverage. Yet you are essentially sabotaging your body. You may crave and consume more calories, which cannot be burned off because of the formaldehyde, and the blocking of the HSL hormone. After all that, it can make you tired and cranky because of the interference of serotonin production, therefore making you unwilling to do any exercise to get rid of all that fat in the first place! Let’s kick the caffeine addiction and stop drinking Diet drinks as an easy step toward a healthier lifestyle!

Sources:
-“Caffeine Nation: Diet Coke.” August 4, 2007. abcnews.go.com/GMA/PersonalBest/story?id=3447205&page=1
-Hareyan, Armen. “Diet Coke is a Joke.” www.emaxhealth.com/11/586.html
-Martini, Betty. “Diet Coke and Aspartame.” www.lightparty.com/Health/DietCokeAspartame.html
-McManamy, John. ‚ÄúDon’t Drink the Diet Coke.‚Äù www.mcmanweb.com/diet_coke.html
-Pick, Marcelle OB/GYN NP “Diet soda — how healthy is it?” www.womentowomen.com/healthyweight/dietsoda.aspx
-Shakhashiri. “Chemical of the Week.” www.scifun.org/chemweek/pdf/Phosphoric_Acid.pdf

Seeing people drinking Vitamin Water or other drinks that resemble it, makes me crazy. I recognized a while back after reading some of the ingredients that this is not good for you.
The reaction I get from people is one of shock, as they didn’t even know there was sugars in it. If it was just sugar they would be better off! It’s just more chemicals! I was pleasantly surprised and reminded of all the harmful crap in them after reading some things on mercola.com site. I thought I would share some of it with you. Just remember that if it seems to good to be true… It is!

www.mercola.com~
Oh yes, here we have it again.
Big surprise, the number one source of calories in the US and the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is being used to sell this product.
“Vitaminwater is Coke’s attempt to dress up soda in a physician’s white coat. Underneath, it’s still sugar water, albeit sugar water that costs about ten bucks a gallon,” said litigation director Steve Gardner of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Actually I disagree with the “sugar water” part as pure cane sugar water is an order of magnitude healthier than free-floating fructose. When you drink Vitaminwater, what you really get is 33 grams — more than six teaspoons — of sugar, including crystalline fructose.

I recently began warning about this new variety of fructose, which may be even worse for your health than high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I recently exposed agave as being worse than HFCS but crystalline fructose is much worse than agave.
While many people mistakenly believe that fructose is an acceptable form of sweetener, it is far from healthy. Refined man-made fructose metabolizes to triglycerides and adipose tissue, not blood glucose. One major downside of this is that fructose does not stimulate your insulin secretion, nor enhance leptin production.

Together, insulin and leptin act as key signals in regulating how much food you eat, and several studies have linked dietary fructose to increased food intake and weight gain.
Additionally, fructose is also known to significantly raise your triglycerides, which puts you at an increased risk of heart disease.
Based on the latest research, crystalline fructose is definitely something you’ll want to avoid as much as possible. Whereas regular HFCS contains 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, crystalline fructose is at minimum 99 percent fructose, which could only mean that all the health problems associated with fructose may be even more pronounced with this product.

If anyone tries to tell you “sugar is sugar,” they are way behind the times. There are major differences in how your body processes each one.
The bottom line is: fructose leads to increased belly fat, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome — not to mention the long list of chronic diseases that directly result. As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day ‚Ķ and this leaves no room for Vitaminwater in your diet.
And if that’s not bad enough, crystalline fructose may also contain arsenic, lead, chloride and heavy metals.