Ditching Diet Soda
If you’re still drinking diet soda as a healthier alternative to regular sodas or other sweetened beverages, it’s time to stop. Instinctively, we think that in order to control our weight, it’s smarter to drink a zero-calorie diet soda instead of a regular soda with hundreds of calories of pure sugar. However, scientific research has shown that this untrue for decades. Clearly the soda manufacturers have been very successful in their advertising campaigns.
Your weight is a result of far more than a simple calories-in-calories-out equation. Underlying and unconscious drives determine what you eat far more than you might realize. Artificial sweeteners play all sorts of tricks on your body’s chemistry, making it much more detrimental to your health than the real stuff.
First off, sweet tastes—artificial or natural—increase appetite. When you drink a diet soda, your body recognizes the sweet taste and responds with this appetite increase. However, the part of your brain that derives satisfaction from food is unaware of the diet soda. This results in a disconnect: one part of your brain responds to the sweetness, but another part is unaware of it because there is not actually any nutrition in it. Our brains and bodies are not happy with imbalances, and strive to correct them. In this case, they strive to correct it by increasing your appetite further so you get the food to make the food-satisfaction pathways in your brain happy. Put simply, your brain recognizes the sweet taste but doesn’t find any food, so compels you to get the food it expected to find.
This Saturday, all branches of the Greater Joliet Area YMCA will celebrate Healthy Kids Day with free community open houses and health and wellness expos. In honor of Healthy Kids Day, the Y has put together an easy-to-follow list to help families develop healthy habits.
