Excess Diet Coke

Hi all, me and my training buddy both have the same problem, we both consume between six and eight cans of diet coke a day.we still drink water as well,just a lot of diet coke in between.

My question is what,if any effect is this having on our goals of getting bigger.We both have the tendancey to add fat if we dont watch our diets.I really love the diet coke but if it has to go it has to go.
Any help or opinions would be appreciated.

Damn 6-8 i thought one was bad enough.

heres some info i found, whether i beleive it is another story, pretty much most soft drinks are bad for you other than mineral water.

what are you talking about? you should have already switched to coke zero by now.

I don’t know if the information on the doorway.com site is valid, but it talks pretty badly about the sweetners in diet soft drinks… I like to drink diet coke and 7up but I’m thinking about stopping. Aspartame seems to be practically toxic…

http://www.aspartame.org/aspartame_myths.html

It seems that for every set of “facts” you can find on the internet you can also find an equal amount disproving them.

Its hard to know what to believe anymore.

I stopped drinking diet pop after I gave some to a friend of mine, and she reacted badly. Her extreme reaction mean it’s doing the same to me, but on a level that I won’t notice too much. Kind of a canary in a coal mine.

I see it as a risk vs reward thing. There might only be a little risk, but there is no real reward.

The jury is out on whether any of that stuff is truly causing anything worth concern in most people.

Certainly, some people react to things, but that doesn’t mean “the same” is happening in everyone else either.

That would be like claiming the fact that someone is allergic to a food means that it would be bad for me too. I’m there is somebody on the planet having a bad reaction to almost any food or substance you can mention… so by that theory there is nothing we can consume.

Who knows? I always hated the concept of paying for water, but whats the difference, you are paying for the diet coke anyway. Substitute a bottle of water and drink if you are thirsty. See if you notice any difference when you cut back.

Maybe what you want is the caffeine?

i stopped drinking soda for 9 months. not one the whole time. just to see if i could, and what would happen. nothing. no wieght loss, no anything. i still drink maybe a couple a week, except in the offseason, or there is nothing else. not even tap water, but no noticable changes. should i have expected something to change?

I think its pretty easy to get hooked on diet coke, you can drink more of it than regular coke without all that sickly sugar and it doesn’t fuzz up your teeth like the normal stuff. But the sweeteners don’t look good and the phosphoric acid rots your teeth pretty well too.

Caffeine in effervescent form is more readily and repidly absorbed also might be why people need to drink so much to top up their methylxanthine levels to feel ‘ok’.

One can a day is prob ok.

i think sodas stop the absoprtion of the nutrients in foods…

i think sodas are addictive

i know they cause you to eat more

They don’t sell Aspartame in England because it has been shown to cause cancer.

I used to drink 2 to 4 Diet Dews a day.

Now I will have one once in a great while.

I feel much better and get fewer headaches.

[quote]Cthulhu wrote:
They don’t sell Aspartame in England because it has been shown to cause cancer.[/quote]

Nonsense.

Heres’ a load of products sold here for example with it in.

http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/citizenship/pdf/ASPARTAME.pdf

I guess the two primary concerns with any soft-drink are caffeine and aspartame. The effects of each are really dependent on the individual I would assume. I mean arsenic causes cancer/death in 50% of people at a certain dose, at a certain bodyweight, and over an extended period of time. But for the other 50% who knows how much it would take for them to develop cancer. Just know that caffeine taxes the nervous system everytime you drink it and can trigger a release of cortisol/DHEA. This really ain’t good for your body’s overall ability to recover and can possibly contribute to adrenal fatigue or overtraining over the long run.

If you smoke, drink alcohol alot, lift, have a stressful job, etc. that’s a lot of stress on the nervous system. Over time it has a cumulative effect. It’s extremely hard to change stress (unless I change jobs) and the goal is to lift long, so cutting out the stuff I could control was really easy for me. I used to drink about 3 liters of the stuff a day. Switching over to 3 liters of water sucked at first, but saved a whole lot of money (it’s free from my well), and now I love drinking water. As much as you can love drinking water.

Aspartame. There’s enough information out there to get me off of this one. Especially because there is evidence that it could be a neurotoxin, or some of the metabolytes could be. There is so much money involved in aspartame (it’s in everything that’s “diet”), that getting the truth on that one, in my mind, is about like trying to figure out why we don’t use alternative fuels as opposed to oil. It’s that big a business.

For me, I haven’t seen many obvious results from stopping either. But it’s more of a preventative thing. I guess it’s like any health based decision as far as that goes.

Jeez - the-artificial-sweetener-stuff is-bad-for-you stuff is an urban myth not supported by real science or studies. Its time to put that one to bed.

I am an attorney, and believe me, if 1/2 the myths about these sweeteners were true every court in the country would be clogged to the gills in product liability lawsuits (and they are not). (God knows Coke and Pepsi have real deep pockets!)
Too much sugar on the other hand IS bad for you and will make you fat.

So drink up - but remember everything in moderation.

[quote]Nolte wrote:
Hi all, me and my training buddy both have the same problem, we both consume between six and eight cans of diet coke a day.we still drink water as well,just a lot of diet coke in between.

My question is what,if any effect is this having on our goals of getting bigger.We both have the tendancey to add fat if we dont watch our diets.I really love the diet coke but if it has to go it has to go.
Any help or opinions would be appreciated.[/quote]

Every person that I have known that has consumed more than, say, four diet cokes per day has exhibited the symptoms on the dorway site. I was one of them and when I gave up aspartame, it made a quantum difference in my health.

If you and your friend do not have any of these effects, I don’t know what to say except that you’re the first person I’ve met that has not. (Or you haven’t been using it for an extended period of time…)

I highly advise not touching the stuff…

[quote]thor wrote:
Jeez - the-artificial-sweetener-stuff is-bad-for-you stuff is an urban myth not supported by real science or studies. Its time to put that one to bed.

I am an attorney, and believe me, if 1/2 the myths about these sweeteners were true every court in the country would be clogged to the gills in product liability lawsuits (and they are not). (God knows Coke and Pepsi have real deep pockets!)
Too much sugar on the other hand IS bad for you and will make you fat.

So drink up - but remember everything in moderation. [/quote]

If anyone has studied heavy, long term usage of aspartame, I’d like to know about it. Everyone that I know that has had problems has used four + diet cokes per day for a year + and they all have suffered the same problems. I know this is anecdotal, but I find it hard to believe that many people could be wrong…

Thanks everyone for the advice,i sort of knew it wasnt healthy but as i dont drink or smoke i thought i would let it slide,its suprises me how often someone holding a ciggarete will tell me diet coke is unhealthy!!My main concern was with fat loss,fat gain etc if i did stop drinking it.Mazilla, thanks for your reply, thats what i was wondering about,do you still drink it now?

[quote]Whisper9999 wrote:
thor wrote:
Jeez - the-artificial-sweetener-stuff is-bad-for-you stuff is an urban myth not supported by real science or studies. Its time to put that one to bed.

I am an attorney, and believe me, if 1/2 the myths about these sweeteners were true every court in the country would be clogged to the gills in product liability lawsuits (and they are not). (God knows Coke and Pepsi have real deep pockets!)
Too much sugar on the other hand IS bad for you and will make you fat.

So drink up - but remember everything in moderation.

If anyone has studied heavy, long term usage of aspartame, I’d like to know about it. Everyone that I know that has had problems has used four + diet cokes per day for a year + and they all have suffered the same problems. I know this is anecdotal, but I find it hard to believe that many people could be wrong…

[/quote]

I once had a potential client come in for an opinion on a lawsuit and i did some research - The file is in storage but some of what I found out:

Aspartame has undergone over 200 scientific tests since 1967. These test have been done on men, women, children, and animals. It has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration, Canada’s Health Protection Branch, the World Health Organization, and over 100 other regulatory nations (1).
A study was done to determine the long term effects of aspartame intake. In this study, 108 men and women, ages 18 to 62, volunteered to be part of a double-blinded, placebo-controlled experiment. During this 24 week study, some volunteers were given 75 mg of aspartame for every kg of body weight a day. No lasting changes in vital signs, body weight, or other side effects were noted. The results from this test show aspartame to be safe (2).

People often complain of headaches after consuming a product that contains aspartame. A study was done to see if these complaints were accurate. This study was a double-blind, placebo controlled test. The results show that aspartame is no more likely to cause a headache then placebo (3).

The only “evidence” seems to be anecdotal. One resercher even suggested that the claimed symptoms were caused by hearing about others with syptoms.

So far for me, 2 years no soft drinks. Really don’t miss it now. Water, milk, wine and non-junky fruit juices, the rare beer ever since. You can find how the conditioning for something you once craved can be broken given time.