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Why Is Diet Soda Not Healthy? Diet sodas are typically sugar-free beverages that have artificial sweeteners. They are marketed, sometimes as sugar-free or zero-calorie drinks, toward health-conscious people, diabetics, athletes, and those who want to lose weight, improve physical fitness or lower their sugar intake. They are supposed to be health drinks. Nevertheless, there are growing concerns of possible health effects of sugar substitutes and caffeine, and there are doubts about their effectiveness as a weight loss tool. Studies on diet soda often contradicted one another, with some indicated that people who drink diet sodas helped them lose weight while others showed that heavy drinkers of diet soda actually became overweight. For instance, a study conducted by the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio suggested consumption of diet soda was related to weight gain. Another study by researchers at the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts also linked diet soda consumption to increased incidence of metabolic syndrome (weight gain and elevated blood sugar). Overweight people are possible targets for chronic diseases including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and Type-2 diabetes. Scientists and researchers are trying for years to find out why and how artificial sweeteners can possibly make people gain weight. And finally, researchers unveiled a possible answer: artificial sweeteners might disrupt the bacteria in some people’s bodies.
Clear evidence was found by Israeli researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot to show that artificial sweeteners, including saccharine and sucralose, actually affect gut bacteria. This in turn influences how food is digested and metabolized. Their findings were published online September 17, 2014 in the journal ‘Nature’. Bacteria living in the intestines and colon are known to assist digest food. They can affect obesity and even appetite, and they are connected to diseases, too, as shown by numerous studies. Most of the test conducted in the study was done in mice, which were fed large amount of sweeteners of all kinds. Their gut bacteria were measured and their metabolisms were tested. Analysis showed definite changes in both gut bacteria and metabolism in mice fed sweeteners, while sugar did not have the same effect. To ensure it was the gut bacteria that made the changes, the researchers removed bacteria from mice that had not consumed sweeteners, and grew them in laboratory dishes along with artificial sweeteners. These sweetener-fed bacteria were then put into new mice that began to show the same changes in metabolism as mice directly fed sweeteners. Researchers indicated that artificial sweeteners seemed to encourage a group of bacteria called Bacteroides and seemed to kill off another group called Clostridiales. Having too many Bacteroides and too few Clostridiales is a pattern sometimes seems in people with diabetes. Saccharine was mostly used in the controlled experiments but in the early tests, the mice responded the same irrespective of the sweetener used (saccharine, sucralose, aspartame or others). This really puzzled the researchers since sweeteners are chemically very different from one another. Experiments had also been done in a small group of 7 people, who did not normally use artificial sweeteners. They were given large amounts for a week. In 4 of them, their blood sugar shot up and they had other changes to metabolism linked to weight gain and pre-diabetes. Microbiome is the population of more than 100 trillion microorganisms that live in the human gut, mouth, skin and elsewhere in the bodies. They help digest food, prevent disease-causing bacteria from invading the body and to synthesize essential nutrients and vitamins. By profiling the microbiome of the human volunteers, the researchers were managed to find 2 distinct patterns that could predict whom sweeteners would affect. Genetic differences already demonstrate that some people can smoke tobacco with little effect, while most develop heart disease or cancer. On the other hand, experts not involved in the study were skeptical because the study was based primarily on mouse experiments and only involved 7 human subjects. Most of them, however, admitted that it is worth looking into more.
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