Breaking Up With Diet Soda

When I was in college, I drank Dr. Pepper all the time. I loved it so much I would sing the company jingle on my way to class. So imagine my surprise when, during my Nutrition for Non-Science Majors class, I discovered that it had sugar in it. It was a pretty traumatic revelation, since I obviously didn’t want to be drinking my calories, especially when I could have been getting them from better places, like midnight Domino’s.

             

Anyway, that was enough for me to break up with the real deal and quickly move on to the diet version.

Although I did go through an adjustment period, within a few months diet soda (Coke, Pepsi, whatever) and I were best friends, attached at the hip, hanging out together at every meal, road trip and movie. I was committed, happy and calorie free. I even lost the freshman thirty fifteen as a result.

                             

But like a lot of relationships that eventually sour, I discovered that my mate had really been bad for me all along. Of course, my well meaning friends tried to tell me, but refill after refill, I didn’t listen.

As the years went on, my addiction to diet soda became unhealthy (funny to write today, now that I know even one diet soda is dangerous). My friends began to notice that I always had one in hand, and usually drank two or three with dinner. Caffeine began to have no effect on me. I could guzzle a can at night and be in full R.E.M. an hour later.

I had no idea how sick I really was.

When the healer discovered my diet soda habit (not hard since I walked in drinking one) he said: “That has artificial sweeteners in it – aspartame. I told you in the beginning that you couldn’t have artificial sweeteners.”

Oh…. that’s what he meant by artificial sweeteners. Aspartame, splenda, sucralose. Whoops – that was a major miscommunication (from me to my mouth).

Unwilling to go down without a fight, however, I began cross examining him on the details of aspartame. Although I had read numerous articles in various notable magazines about how diet soda can dehydrate you and possibly make you even hungrier, that was certainly not enough evidence for me to kick it to the curb overnight. I still was in need of serious proof that it was toxic.

I now regret ever asking.