diet pop - not so diet after all?

Years ago, in 1973, I went to Weight Watchers and lost down to a socially acceptable weight (about 100 lbs less than I weigh now!). And I seemed to be, for the first time, "easily" keeping it off. My secret? 6-8 cans of "Diet Rite Cola" (remember that brand?) a day. Or sometimes more. And a bedtime snack of whipped carnation non fat milk (1/4 cup) sweetened with --- artificial sweetener of course!

Unfortunately while enjoying my smaller size, I found I was getting some strange symptoms in my eyes. Blurs in the field of vision. Pain in the eyeballs. And lumps in the eye lids.

I went to the eye doctor and he wasn't much help. "You have lumps in your eyelids!" he announced, being champion of the obvious.

So I reaccessed what I was doing and "a lot of diet pop" came up. Could THAT be it, I wondered. So I gave up "Diet Rite Cola", cold turkey. And I gave up my nice evening snack of artificially sweetened whipped non fat instant milk. And in a month or so, the lumps in my eyelids disappeared as did the pain in the eyeballs and the blur in the field of vision.

I also pretty well trashed my gall bladder in that dieting stint in 1973 which I found out with a shock when I tried the - then newest thing - the Atkins Diet, had a day and a half of delightful parties in my mouth like cheese quiche and then had the granddaddy of all gall bladder attacks!. Well, that's another show but a common repercussion apparently, of losing a lot of weight on a diet. In fact, in many weight loss surgery patients, they just remove the gall bladder at the time of surgery because they know it's going to go bad anyway. A common repercussion, one of many from dieting which is buried in the medical literature and never talked about in polite company.

The problem with my giving up "Diet Rite" was that without the caffeine load I was getting from the diet cola, I started to feel extreme starvation fatigue (Gina Kolata called it "Primal hunger" in her recent book, "Re-Thinking Thin") It's our body's major production of hormones to force us to eat to gain weight and feel better. Worked for me. I'd felt this kind of fatigue before, (also identified in the Ansel Keyes starvation studies of the 1940's) when I was in my early 20's trying to force my weight to a socially acceptable number and I knew there was only one way to feel better. To eat! So eat I did. I'm not a binge eater. I just ate normally but that caused a 90 lbs weight gain.

The sweetener in Diet Rite Cola was saccharine, then considered "totally safe" despite the fact that it had caused some bladder cancer in the rat studies.

In 1980, another sweetener came out. Aspartame or Nutrasweet. I investigated it, wondering if it would work better than saccharine had done for me. But when I found it could turn into formaldehyde in your body, seemed kind of a no brainer that it was more than a bit toxic. That logical thought process and my observing a member of my online community (BBS in those days) get a case of Multiple Sclerosis rendering her bedfast which "miraculously went away" when she stopped consuming Nutrasweet, were a strong argument in my book to stay away from the chemical! I decided to not consume Nutrasweet or aspartame long before the anti Aspartame folks arose on the net. And to this day, I still remain an aspartame virgin.

My huge weight gain after my first tour of Weight Watchers was my fault of course, or so I believed.

However, a recent story tells us that some of my weight gain might have been because my heavy consumption of artificial sweetener had caused changes in my brain chemistry. ouch!

In fact, they are telling us, drinking only one can of diet soda a day can cause those changes in brain chemistry which can result in not only, weight gain but a significantly higher risk of heart disease.

After 2 large studies showed that people who drink diet pop had a 30 percent greater chance of gaining weight, and a 30 percent greater chance of low HDL cholesterol and/or metabolic syndrome, two heart disease risk factors, we recently have become aware of a rat study out of Purdue which actually showed the brain chemistry changes in the rats.

Too bad for the pop moguls who had just successfully de-valued the large studies of people "well you see, people who drink diet pop tend to eat more and exercise less" they told us. They don't want us to stop buying diet pop because Americans spend $21 billion bucks on it per year.

The pop industry is trying to de-value the Purdue study but it seems to just not go away. Not only that but now ABC news pulled up other things discovered about artificial sweetener - things which seemed to have evaded the news previously. For example, one expert opined that "the acid load delivered by soda of any kind" can be damaging.

The acid load. hmmm. I remember an internet forward stating that Diet Coke was good for cleaning the toilet. I had seen it eat away the tarnish on a penny in seconds after the penny was dropped into a small glass of it. My husband was not surprised at this - "phosphoric acid is a solvent used in some shops to clean tools," he told me. Diet Coke did clean the toilet well, I found out.

And after a lot of my teeth had had the enamel worn away, I read that cola can eat through the enamel on your teeth.

Diet guru Richard Simmons announced about 10 years ago, that when he quit drinking diet soda, he lost 12 lbs without changing anything else. He was largely ignored, of course.

Now people are beginning to listen. The anti aspartame folks telling us for years, that nutrasweet is an "excitotoxin" (kills brain cells and may be a secondary cause of other ailments like Parkinsonism) or that aspartame delivers a fairly heavy load of methanol into our system (kills liver cells and can cause cirrhosis and after that, can muck up the mitochondria and more) didn't have that much affect on people.

But tell them that diet soda may make you gain weight? That they listen to. Apparently having a dead brain or dying nerve cells isn't a dealbreaker but having a fat body is? 'Nuff said. For once, fat-a-phobia may actually cause us to be healthier.

(Although, they will probably find an equally dangerous chemical to substitute, says my less optimistic side, a chemical which after those selling it tell us it's "safe", people will flock to buy it.)

Is all Food really FOOD?

We read every day that certain foods are bad, other foods are "good". The opinions (I suppose similar to many other topics) seem to run in two extremes:

1. Eat only "whole foods" - no sugar, no white flour items and nothing with anything you cannot pronounce in it.
2. Food is food and it's all good. (This is the "don't worry- be happy sentiment" that seems so right just because it sounds so good)

Both of these are popular - because either one is easy to follow... you either eat everything with no discrimination or you eat practically nothing.
As usual the truth lies somewhere between.

One article in a medical journal, attempting to solve the mystery of what is proper to eat, brought up the apparent contradictions in what we consider "good food" and "bad food"

>>>SAMA Health and Medical Publishing:
South African Medical Journal (1990) 78:441 (Editorial).<<<

It stated for example:

"French-fries are junk-food, but roast potatoes are not"

Unfortunately, perhaps because the article was written in 1990 when we did not know as much about trans fat as we do now, this is NOT a contradiction at all. If you take a good food and add unhealthy chemicals to it, then it's kind of a no brainer that the food will no longer good. Which is exactly what happens with French Fries. Even if they are NOT fried in transfat, we know now that in deep frying anything, chemicals are formed which are suspected somewhat toxic and these are added to the food, and thus it can be, without a contradiction that the same food which is healthy when cooked in the oven BECOMES unhealthy when deep fried.

The same article states:

>>>"bread is a basic food-stuff, but biscuits [cookies] are junk; wine comprises "empty calories," but fruit juices are health foods"<<<

Anyone who has made cookies, knows that they are composed of pretty equal parts of fat, sugar and flour. Where is the food in that? How does the author even compare that to bread?

The statement about wine is outdated - wine is now known to have antioxidants in it and fruit juices are no longer considered very healthy if they have "high fructose corn syrup" in them.

Let's look at "high fructose syrup" - this is highly concentrated sugar, probably added because today's "diet sweetener" generation is used to things which are 100 times sweeter than sugar. It is a manufactured product which is highly concentrated modified sugar and according to some nutritionists, not as easily assimilated by the body as natural sugar. Some rat studies have suggested that fructose can cause liver problems if consumed in high amounts (and a person who drinks a lot of pop could possibly reach those amounts). According to "The Murky World of High Fructose" by Linda Joyce Forristal, CCP

>>> "The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Dr. Field, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic."<<<<

Back to the SAMA article, it goes on to state that:

>>the sugar in cake is detrimental to health, but the sugar in honey and grapes is not<<

Here, the concentration of sugar is the difference. Pretty much anything in high concentration can become toxic. Two aspirins cure a headache. Ten aspirins might land a person in the hospital for a stomach pumping.

Although this article is 17 years old and very outdated, the sentiment still exists in many circles today... "it's all food and it's all good".

Today's advocates of "all food is food and good to eat" sometimes use the excuse that "well, we have a longer lifespan today than we did when we did not consume any "junk food" or "fast food". This reason may be a straw man. The longer life span may have a lot to do with many factors from better work conditions and antibiotics, to the flush toilet which eliminated a lot of bacteria and viruses. It also should be noted that today we have an extremely high incidence of cancer in our society and some of the chemicals in junk food have been suggested in some research to be a factor in this cancer epidemic.

Today we have whole classes of substances that I would call "non foods". They are basically mostly fat (often transfat) and/or chemicals with virtually no nutritional value whatsoever but they often have lots of calories. Potato chips, donuts (now there's a real unhealthy combination of deep frying chemicals, transfat and sugar) and much of what you find in the super market isn't REALLY good to eat.

And we have other classes of foods which are perhaps no calories but pure chemicals, stuff which under different circumstances we would never consume as food. This class of "food" includes things like diet soda, coke etc.

Coke is a solvent and has phosphoric acid in it so it's in no way, any type of a food. Sure it tastes good, so does anti freeze but that doesn't mean we go and drink it.

What to do is a matter of opinion but I don't think it's healthy to restrict one's food drastically to exclude whole food groups such as the "whole food" advocates suggest but neither is it healthy to assume that everything in the supermarket is "food" in the real sense of the word and eat indiscriminately.

The best which seems to be a lot of work, is to learn to read labels and decide carefully.

If it's got chemicals in it like nutrasweet or splenda, avoid it... these just give you more sugar cravings and may actually cause weight gain because they unbalance the insulin levels - some research suggests that when you consume artificial sweetener, your body tasting the sweet taste, produces more insulin to deal with the sugar which of course, never comes. Wouldn't it be a hoot if the high rate of diabetes we are seeing today, has more to do with the consumption of artificial sweeteners than it does with "obesity"?

The sweetener, aspartame or nutrasweet has also been suggested in some 90 worldwide studies to be a factor in the incidence of brain cancer and leukemia. Aspartame contains a neurotoxin - an excitotoxin which can kill neurons in the brain. Excitotoxins are newly identified - for the last decade only those in neurology were familiar with them. MSG is an excitotoxin also.

If it's got mostly chemicals that you cannot pronounce in it, then there might not be much food in it.

If it's got "high fructose corn syrup" in it, it probably is best avoided.

But some processed foods can be, I feel, ok. For example, if they have a lot of vitamins in them like health bars.

Drink water instead of soda but get bottled water. Tap water has a lot of chemicals in it which are NOT removed by reverse osmosis filters.

Forget things like donuts and most "sweets" - regardless of what one weighs, these are definitely "non foods" and not healthy to eat.

Sorry but today, sadly speaking, it's NOT "all food" and it's NOT all good.

Artificial Sweetener - really a diet aid?

Artificial sweetener is considered a good thing in our society because it doesn't have any calories and thus, people feel they can have their sweets for free.

Well, seems nothing is for nothing.


Here is something the diet industry did not publish but it's in the Congressional record:

>>>>From
the Congressional Record, Senate, Page S5511 (protest of the National Soft Drink Assn against the use of aspartame):

"Aspartame has been demonstrated to inhibit the carbohydrate induced synthesis of the neurotransmitter serotonin (Wurtman affidavit). Serotonin blunts the sensation of craving carbohydrates and thus is part of the body's feedback system that helps limit consumption of carbohydrate to appropriate levels. Its inhibition by aspartame could lead to the anomalous result of a diet product causing increased consumption of carbohydrates."
<<<<

A couple of epidemiological studies have shown that people actually gain weight when they consume diet soda.... perhaps this is one reason.

Another thing I have read about artificial sweeteners is when your body senses the sweetness in your mouth, it starts producing insulin to handle the increased (what it thinks was) sugar. But when no sugar is forthcoming, the higher insulin levels can cause carb craving and actual weight gain.

This is true of ALL artificial sweeteners - it's the nature of the beast.

Finally, here is another side effect I've noticed. If you eat small amounts of sugar, you lose your taste for super sweet stuff. But I have noticed that folks who regularly consume diet soft drinks, have - if anything - a heightened taste for sugar and can consume super sweet stuff with nary a blink of the eye.

Probably why manufacturers have felt it necessary to put stuff like "high frutose syrup" into non diet foods - because consumers of artificial sweetener (which is SUPER sweet) would not find NATURALLY sweetened products, sweet enough.

There is no winning a battle with mother nature.... she always wins....