With so many people aiming to be
healthier, they are going to the store and buying diet soda or diet juice. Do
these diet sodas and juices really have more health benefits than regular soda
and juices?
People choose to drink “diet”-labeled
drinks for many different reasons. It might be because they want to be
healthier, they like the taste better, or that’s all they had in the fridge.
The question that is always being asked is, “is it really healthier?” I’ve
heard many people including, my mom say that if you have to choose between diet
soda and regular soda that you should choose regular soda. Even though it would
mean choosing the one with a lot more sugar, it’s better for our bodies than
the artificial sweeteners are. One reason is because our bodies know what to do
with sugar. They just store it as fat; but our bodies don’t know what to do with
artificial sweeteners since they’re made from chemicals.
One artificial
sweetener that had a bad rap is aspartame, and there’s a good reason for it
too! According to Dr. Mercola, aspartame is an artificial sweetener made of
aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol. The controversy over whether or not
aspartame is safe is huge because, if people found out what aspartame does to
people it could hurt the sales of the major food and drink industries. Aspartame
actually is bad for our bodies. Even though it won’t make us fat like sugar
does, it has a lot more side effects than sugar. It is linked to symptoms such
as migraines, nausea, dizziness, seizures, anxiety attacks, hearing loss, and lots
more. They even found that aspartame can trigger or worsen brain tumors,
diabetes, mental retardation, Alzheimer’s and more. To see the whole article of what Dr. Mercola
has to say about aspartame you can go here:
Because
of its name people tend to not feel bad about drinking diet soda. They might
even drink more because they think they aren’t adding to their daily calories.
This is a way diet soda can trick the consumer. Diet soda is even addictive.
Not only is the aspartame in diet soda addictive, so is the caffeine. I’m sure
you’ve heard of, or at least know of someone who is addicted to caffeine. I
used to have a history to teacher who was constantly drinking diet pepsi. I
don’t know if she was addicted to the caffeine or the aspartame but, either way
she had to be addicted to something in it!
With all this sneaky, artificial sugar
stuff it’s hard to know if what you’re eating (in this case drinking) is safe
or not. One thing my family does is buy soda called Sevia. The sevia soda comes
in lots of different flavors like the popular flavor cola, as well as
lemon-lime, and cherry. You can find it at most health markets, and I think a
lot of grocery stores are starting to carry it. Sevia is a soda sweetened by
the stevia plant. We actually used to have our own stevia plant, and we would
just pick the leaves off of it and eat them because they tasted like sugar.
Stevia is a great alternative to sugar or aspartame, and knowing that I’m not
drinking a bunch of chemicals makes my pop taste even better!
Sources:
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