Have you switched to diet soda to avoid the excess sugar in regular soda? You probably like how it tastes and the fact that it doesn’t have calories. Well, this article will change your opinion of diet soda.
The truth is that diet soda is not good for your health. You see, soda manufacturers use aspartame (an artificial sweeter) instead of sugar. And a recent study conducted by University of Iowa shows that this ingredient can increase risk of heart disease.
Dangers of diet soda
The study involved 60,000 women with an average age of 62 years and was conducted over a period of nine years. Note that this was observational study – which means the researchers relied on the information given by the participants.
The researchers found that there was a 30 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and 50 percent risk of heart-related death in participants who drank two or more cans of diet soda compared to those who didn’t drink diet soda.
The head researcher, Dr. Ankur Vyas said that this study confirmed their previous findings that diet soda causes metabolic syndrome.
This was definitely the biggest study on the effects of diet soda and it can benefit lots of people since 20 percent of Americans take diet drinks every day.
The participants were divided into four groups. Group 1 drank two or more cans of diet drinks daily. Group 2 drank five to seven cans of diet drinks per week. Group 3 drank four cans per week. Group 4 drank zero cans in three months.
At the end of the study researchers checked the rate of heart disease, heart failure, stroke, cardiovascular death, and peripheral arterial disease in the participants. They found that there was 8.5 percent occurrence of these conditions in Group 1, 6.9 percent occurrence in Group 2, 6.8 occurrence in Group 3, and 7.2 occurrences in group 4.
Realize that the women in Group 1 were younger which means the diet sodas were causing heart problems at a high rate. This increases the possibility that aspartame causes heart-related conditions.
Since this was an observational study, the results are not definite. More research is being done on the effects diet soda on heart health. But it would be wise to stop taking diet drinks now.
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