Give Us A Friggin' Break!
Did you see this study from Boston University School of Medicine that shows people who drink one or more diet sodas a day develop the same risk of cardiovascular disease as those who drink the regular sugar soda? So I’m drinking sodas sweetened with Splenda and acting like they don’t have an aftertaste and I’m still going to be a candidate for an angioplasty? Something’s wrong.
Back when I worked at my dad’s liquor store years ago, I routinely sold corpulent customers Twinkies and Ding Dongs along with a Diet Coke. The understanding was that the diet drink would cancel the calories of the snack cake. Okay, maybe not cancel but at least it mitigated the dietary damage.
Now these “experts” are telling us that we should’ve been drinking the sugared soft drinks all along since there’s no difference. And who wouldn’t rather drink the real versions of these drinks rather than the taste-limited diet versions? I want to walk into a 7-11 right now and get a 55 gallon drum of Moutain Dew. I want to ‘do the Dew’ like the skateboarding dweebs I see in the commercials rather than doing the diet Dew like I’ve been doing.
What are they going to tell us next?
Instead of drinking my virtually no calorie six shot venti iced espresso with sugar-free hazelnut and a splash of half ‘n’ half from Starbucks, maybe I should switch to a 500 calorie venti Caramel Frappuccino.
Do I trade in my coffee and oatmeal breakfast for one of Krispy Kremes and Tang?
Does exercise cause weight gain?
Perhaps I should go ahead and supersize my burger order since according to this study just by drinking a no calorie, 99% water, artificially sweetened and flavored drink my freakin’ heart can still explode.
One time I saw Chef Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network cook a hot dog, stuffed with cheese, wrapped in bacon. If any food should come with a defibrillator, it’s that. But I guess pretty soon good ol’
Okay, the study is inconclusive because obviously they couldn’t have studied people who just drank sodas. The soda drinkers ate food, too. So if both sugary soda drinkers and diet soda drinkers are scarfing down bacon and cheese hot dogs, it makes sense that they both would have poor health outcomes. Without monitoring the other food intake, the study becomes pretty worthless.
Which is why I hate studies like this. They come out with a big headline that grabs all the attention and does people a disservice. I’m no scientist but I can figure out that you’d be hard pressed to gain weight drinking a substance that has zero calories. It would be difficult to see how diet sodas could cause “metabolic syndrome,” a doctors fancy phrase for a collection of symptoms like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems and the like.
With the obesity epidemic and so many trying to diet, nutritional information has got to be as precise as possible before it’s released to the public. It’s already too easy for people like me to throw in the towel.
So go back to drinking the diet sodas. Just lay off the Twinkies.
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