Been drinking exclusively (give or take) no-sugar caffeinated sodas since a child. Not obese or diabetic. Mid-thirties now. How bad is this?

  • Bob Robertson IX @discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    301·
    5 days ago

    I was raised drinking soda as the default… water was never something we’d willingly drink. In middle school I noticed that every day I’d get home from school with a splitting headache and I’d take a couple of aspirin and wash it down with a Coke and the headache would go away. My parents realized that it was likely caffeine withdrawal… so instead of cutting out soda, they started getting me caffeine free soda.

    It wasn’t until my older brother was in his late 30s and experienced kidney failure and required a transplant that I realized I needed to make a change. I switched over to water and unsweet tea as my defaults. Even after his transplant my brother still would only drink soda… he didn’t survive Covid. And today my mom routinely has kidney issues but still refuses to drink water.

    Everyone in my family, except for me, has diabetes and kidney issues. I’m sure my 30+ years of daily soda drinking will catch up to me, but I do credit cutting soda out of my diet as having a major positive impact on my overall health.

  • DudleyMason@lemmy.ml
    7·
    4 days ago

    Diet Soda is essentially just flavored seltzer water with more flavor than the drinks actually labelled as flavored seltzer.

    A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to understand that.

    Most of the people touring horrible health risks have conflated diet sodas with sugary sodas, some have misunderstood some genuine studies on diet soda. The reason diet sodas correlate strongly with certain health conditions is primarily selection bias. Many diet soda drinkers also eat high-fat, high-sodium, US-style fast food diet, which is actually pretty hard in your body. Also Diet Soda’s sweet taste can trigger heightened insulin production, because your body expects it to be full of sugar, and that heightened insulin can cause sugar cravings, and some people then consume more sugar satisfying that craving that would have been in a regular soda anyway.

    Diet Soda is not a diuretic, it hydrates you just as well as tea, seltzer, or even a slightly smaller glass of plain ol water. There’s some unanswered questions about the artificial sweeteners and their long term effects, but any of the really bad stuff they’ve found in actual studies has been at far higher concentration that a person would consume even if Diet Soda was their only fluid intake.

      • DudleyMason@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 days ago

        Sure. But that’s not what this post is about, is it?

        And water is only great if you have great water. Most of the developed world settles for “won’t make you sick” but leaves their water tasting horrible when it comes out of the pipes.

        • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          2 days ago

          Having spent a lot of my time the last two years in the global south, I’ve got a real shocker for you. They sell bottled water. It’s cheap too.

  • angband@lemmy.world
    51·
    4 days ago

    How are your teeth? Also, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11501561/

    More modern research is starting to explore the biochemistry involved with adverse outcomes. That being the case, people saying bad outcomes are based on lifestyle issues that go hand in hand with using sugar substitutes are behind the curve in the research.

    Overall, my opinion is they are generally bad if you consume them multiple times every day, at minimum.

  • WolvenSpectre@lemmy.caEnglish
    122·
    5 days ago

    Its not good. Caffeinated sodas are a diathetic and it will pull water out of your system. Check out ChubbyEmu’s Channel on YouTube for the explanation. If you have been drinking exclusively sodas since a child with no water in take you could be damaging your liver and kidneys. Also I would strongly suggest taking a muti-vitimin daily. Most diet sodas make it harder for you to absorb certain nutrients like folic acid and IIRC B-12.

    If you were one of the people that Aspartame is an issue you would know it by know because almost every time you drank soda you would have a headache. You are probably getting more of them just from the dehydration.

    Then there are the dental issues. I don’t care how old you are, start using sensodyne and look at having your teeth sealed. Your dentist can do wonders that were not possible 15 years ago, but that will give you issues.

    Now a while back there was a thing about sodas and diet sodas raising your risk of Cancer but you would have to drink 6L+ a day. Lower amounts are believed to actually fight against cancer cells in their early stages.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    5·
    5 days ago

    Everybody is different, could be fine could be developing issues that won’t by symptomatic until later. Best way to find out is to ask a doctor who can take a family history, run tests to see if you’re within normal ranges, ask medically relevant questions, etc.

  • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    61·
    5 days ago

    Even sugar-free drinks are suspected to increase your chance of diabetes, obesity, and a wide variety of other health issues. High consumption of artifically sweetened beverages are suspected to increase your likelihood of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer, notably a large increase in cholecystectomies, which you say you’ve had.

    Here’s a long review of smaller-scale studies of a variety of associations and/or suspected causations of diet soda consumption - Notably arterial disease and “remodelling”, Weight gain, Depression in later life, Eating disorders, impaired cognitive development, hip fractures, UTIs, Diabetic retinopathy, End-stage renal disease, Leukemia and lymphoma, and overall mortality. The review concluded that by objective standards, the included studies were all at least of “moderate” quality.

    Need I go on?

    Is a lot of that going to be correlative? For sure yeah. Is it still maybe a very good idea to incorporate more water into your diet? Also yeah.

    • dropdrip@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      4 days ago

      Thanks for the links. I’ll give them a read through.

      They didn’t separate artificial sweetened beverages from those with sugar in the article about gallbladder cancer. That’s sort of… important from my perspective. Cancer and gallstones are different things anyway. I’m confidant my issues were with malnutrition over my gallbladder and the problematic gallstones.

      Likewise, obese people consume “diet” sodas in an attempt to diet. Even in that review it has garbage conclusions like “consumption of any type of soda”. Yea, that’s real helpful in figuring out if aspartame is a carcinogen–let’s sample people who don’t drink aspartame exclusively to collect two data-sets: those that drink water exclusively and those that drink sugar-soda exclusively. That says nothing about aspartame.

      A lot of this is garbage. I hate meta-reviews. They’re always garbage.

      Like, I’ve already stated I’m not obese, yet people keep bringing up obesity and sugar-related diseases. Thanks for not reading.

      • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        To be honest, your responses read like someone who’s already decided that it’s not an issue. These studies definitely have flaws and limitations, I admitted that - But across the board, even those that take efforts to control for confounding factors like obesity and sugar in various ways, these issues are reported as above.

        These are the facts as we know them. Do with it as you like, it’s your life, but I would definitely argue the data at least means it’ll likely cause issues and likely already has. Don’t randomly accuse me of not reading because we disagree on interpretations.

  • LemsGhost@lemmy.mldeleted by creator
    63·
    5 days ago

    Ummmm really bad? Also soft drink production wastes insane amounts of water. I might drink one sometimes as a treat, but when I’m home I usually drink tea or water.

        • DudleyMason@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 days ago

          You definitely do not need water to grow the sugar for sugar free soda, which is what the thread is about.

          Edit: and it looks like the biggest source of “wastewater” is the impurities filtered out of well or municipal water to make the filtered water that goes in the can, so basically that “waste water” is mineral slurry and if you filter your drinking water then you’re contributing about the same amount of “waste water” per liter drank.

          • LemsGhost@lemmy.mldeleted by creator
            11·
            3 days ago

            It still takes more water to produce softdrinks than is in a soft drink. Coca Cola and Pepsi are notorious for destroying aquifers.

  • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org
    51·
    5 days ago

    Its bad. Your body still has to process everything in that thats not water and none of it is a positive for the body. Drink water by default and make soda a treat