the Centrist

I can remember a patient who was a professor of biology looking at me in wonderment as he watched me sip some diet soda between patients. He knew that I knew better, but I said, “Hey there are no calories and no sugar.”
He said, “True, but you know that carbonation makes it anti-nutrition.”
According to WebMD:”Drinking more than one soft drink daily is associated with a higher risk of developing adverse metabolic traits …”. This includes diet and zero calorie sodas. They define metabolic disease as “the presence of three or more of following risk factors: excess waist circumference, high blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, low high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels (bad cholesterol), and high fasting glucose levels (precursor for diabetes). One of the “more striking aspects of this study,” lead investigator Dr Ramachandran Vasan (Boston University School of Medicine, MA) told heartwire was that: “It actually doesn’t matter if the soft drink is regular or diet. There was an association of increased risk of developing the metabolic syndrome with both types of drinks.” The findings were published online July 23, 2007 in Circulation. Vasan is particularly concerned because “the consumption of soft drinks has doubled to tripled between 1977 and 2001” and “soft-drink consumption is linked with weight gain and obesity as well as an increased risk of diabetes” … not to mention tooth decay. Dr Ravi Dhingra (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA), “related the incidence of metabolic syndrome and its components to soft-drink consumption in more than 6000 individuals participating in the Framingham Heart Study.” The data revealed that: “those consuming more than one soft drink daily had a 48% higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome than those who drank less than one soft drink per day.”
Vasan added: “Clearly, these findings are sufficiently intriguing that scientists now have to help us understand better why we see this association … We are not inferring causality from this analysis. It is just an association, so we need to turn to the scientists who are better positioned to help us understand the association more.”
So my friendly professor was correct when he admonished me over twenty years ago … ‘drinking carbonated beverages is at best: anti-nutritional, at worst harmful.’