Diet Soda: Fewer Calories In The Glass May Mean More On The Plate
If only dropping pant sizes were as easy as switching from Coke to Coke Zero.
Sure, you're cutting out empty calories when you ditch the sugar-sweetened drinks in favor of artificially sweetened ones. But there's growing evidence that suggests this isn't really helping in the battle of the bulge.
The latest ding against diet drinks? Researchers report this week that overweight and obese people who choose diet beverages eat about the same number of total calories as their counterparts guzzling sugary drinks – they're just getting more of their calories from solid food.
In other words, their drinks may be no-calorie, but they're making up for it at meal and snack times.
And that suggests that public health messages urging people to drop the sugar-sweetened drinks in favor of diet ones to combat obesity need to be tweaked, says the study's lead author, Sara Bleich, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
"We need to go beyond telling them, 'You need to drink less sugary soda,' " Bleich tells The Salt. "That's because when people make the switch from regular to diet, they're not making many other changes."
Americans' diet soda habit has exploded in the past 15 years — 1 in 5 of us now consume one on a daily basis. Overweight and obese adults are about twice as likely as their healthy weight counterparts to drink diet beverages, according to Bleich's findings, which appear in the American Journal of Public Health. And it makes sense, she says, that this reflects a desire to shed excess weight.
But Bleich and her colleagues wanted to know how Americans' rising diet drink habit relates to overall calorie consumption. So they looked at data for adults 20 and older gathered between 1999 and 2010 by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It's an ongoing program that collects details on eating habits and other health-related information from a nationally representative sample of people in the U.S.
And what did they find? Turns out, overweight adults who drank artificially sweetened beverages ate on average 88 more solid-food calories per day than their weight counterparts who drank sugary beverages, while obese diet drinkers ate an extra 194 calories per day.
The Salt
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