Diet Soda Drinkers: Is Your Habit a Health Risk?

Remember how great soda pop used to taste during a family cookout, a humid day, or a night at the movies?

Within the past five years or so, researchers and dieticians have found consuming a large (or any) amount of soda pop isn't great for your health, mostly due to all the added sugar.

You may have been thrilled when diet soda drinks and other diet drinks (fruit, water, energy, etc.) started making their way in grocery stores and restaurants, giving you the same carbonated flavor of a normal soda minus all the sugar.

Problem solved, right?

Recently, repeated studies have shown diet soda actually backfires on your health and causes you to eat more, gain weight and potentially suffer from other serious health issues.

According to research presented at the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session, women who regularly drank diet drinks face a greater risk of heart attack and death compared to women who rarely drank them at all.

In this particular study, researchers looked at 59,000 post-menopausal women and the relationship between diet drinks and cardiovascular disease. The researchers analyzed how often the women drank diet drinks (diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners) over a three-month period.

Nine years later, researchers went back to see how these women were doing.

What they found was that women who drank two or more diet drinks a day were 30 percent more likely to suffer a cardiovascular event and 50 percent were likely to die of related diseases compared to those women who did not ever consume (or rarely consumed) diet drinks.

What other conclusions were drawn from this study?

Dr. Mike discusses why people moved toward diet soda pop, the link between diet soda and heart attack risk and why you should try to permanently remove diet sodas and other diet drinks from your diet.