Soft drinks
For many years now, we have been offered a reportedly better alternative to our soft drinks of choice. Diet drinks have long been part of our lives as consumers. We’ve all tried them and many of us continue to regularly and even exclusively drink them in order to lose weight and to try controlling our sugar intake as these drinks do not contain sugar but rather other sweeteners such as saccharine or aspartame. But these ingredients have already long been known to cause harm. Aspartame for example has been factually proven to be a neurotoxin.
But now even more research has been conducted in a new study made by scientists at the Boston University. The study which was conducted on over four thousand adults found that one serving of diet drinks per day leads to an increase in the consumer’s risk of dementia and strokes by at least three times. The study compared the drinking of diet drinks to that of full sugar drinks and was able to find no link between those and any of the above mentioned health problems.
- While sugary drinks are also not recommended by the medical community, the Boston University researchers believe that aspartame and saccharine greatly impact blood vessels in the long run in a way that can trigger dementia and strokes. This finding is particularly alarming when you consider the fact that 25 percent of the soft drinks available on the market are actually diet drinks.
- This adds up to a previous research by the Imperial College in London that has thoroughly shown that diet drinks have almost exactly the same effect as full fat drinks when it comes to their ability to help us lose weight.
These findings obviously warrant more research into the composition and impact of these drinks, but in the meanwhile, the team behind them urges all health professionals to refrain from promoting diet drinks as a viable alternative to exercise and health eating if their patients would like to lose weight.
