What Diet Coke Does to Your Body

This summer it was reported that Diet Coke was as bad for your teeth as crack cocaine and meth. While those facts turned out to be less than true, we all know that soda isn’t great for us. In fact, it’s so horrible for your health that bad teeth should be the least of your worries. Here are the top three reasons my fellow Diet Coke addicts and I cried today upon reading a new article on our favorite beverage's health risks:

1. Don’t Expect to Lose Any Weight

Many women drink it because it contains zero calories and can give them their sugar fix — like a no guilt dessert, right? Wrong! All of the fake sugar in diet cola (and there is lots) actually may have the reverse effect on your weight. The sweet chemicals confuse your "natural gut bacteria", which causes your body to produce insulin. Insulin, according to health and fitness site Get The Gloss, controls sugar levels and fat storage and results in "‘diet cola belly in the form of more fat around the midriff’ - just where you wanted to shed fat.” Yikes!

2. It is So, So Bad for Your Health

Not only has aspartame been linked to cancer many times, but the caramel coloring used in Diet Coke might also have cancerous effects. The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned in 2011 to ban the coloring because of the contaminants it contained, two of which have been found to cause lung, liver, or thyroid cancer or leukemia in laboratory mice or rats.

But that’s not all folks! In some studies, diet cola has been found to increase the risk of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, Get The Gloss says that “results of a ten year study found a link with cardiovascular disease among those who drank it every day; cola drinkers were found to be 43 percent more likely to suffer a stroke or heart attack during a ten-year period than those who abstained.” Oh, good.

3. You Will Look and Feel Older Faster

It’s common knowledge that the chemicals in soda deteriorate your teeth and bones, but now we know that they have the same affect on your heart, kidneys, skin, and muscles. The main culprit of this is phosphoric acid, used to give colas a tangy flavor and increase their shelf life. A typical can of Diet Coke contains 44-62mg of phosphoric acid, which is more than the average soda. Get the Gloss says that the acid accelerates the aging process and has been shown to make skin and muscles wither, damage the heart and kidneys over time, and raise the risk of osteoporosis.”

Not scared yet? DailyMail reports that a study published in FASEB journal (the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) “found that the excessive phosphate levels found in sodas caused lab rats to die a full five weeks earlier than the rats whose diets had more normal phosphate levels.”

In sum, early death, corporeal decay, metabolism damage and increased health risks are what we can expect from popping open a can of our beloved Diet Coke. But will that stop me from having some tomorrow? Probably not. Does this news make me feel like this?

Yes.