Still drinking diet coke?
I recently noticed that a friend’s bottle of “Orangina Lite” proudly proclaimed: “No sugar or artificial colours or flavourings”. It looked so wholesome I actually initially misread this as claiming it had no artificial sweeteners. However, a read of the ingredients revealed that it contains aspartame. I suppose the claim is true in a legal sense but hardly fair. A quick glance at the bottle suggests that it has nothing artificial in it and my friend (who is pretty clued up and not keen on additives) had bought it for her 4 year old son. Parents are being encouraged to think that this is a healthy, natural drink.
Here’s a scary study which shows that daily diet soda consumption is linked to a 36% greater risk of developing metabolic syndrome and a 67% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19151203
Why is this not more widely publicised for goodness sake? A 67% increase is HUGE!
The website containing this article is well worth a browse around as it has lots of research on the effects of sugar, fructose and artificial sweeteners. Basically none of them seem to do you much good! And fructose (which is sometimes portrayed by our friends the food manufacturers as a “healthy fruit sugar”) seems to be worse than glucose. (Sugar and high fructose corn syrup both contain fructose).
I was in America recently and it’s getting increasingly hard to buy anything at all processed (even a sandwich) without it containing high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. I also spent a fruitless half hour scouring the supermarket for a yoghurt which had not had most of its goodness removed. I had to give up - there was no full fat yoghurt and certainly none of my favourite Greek yogurt. The irony of course lay in the size of the people picking up the “zero fat” versions. I was tempted to take a photograph but thought I might cause offense creating my “large belly framed by low fat yoghurt” composition.
Albert Einstein supposedly said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, the result so far of eating zero fat yoghurt and diet soda is an obese America - I wonder why everyone is still doing it? Are the people insane or just brainwashed for the sake of profit?
