Soft drink is bad for you.

Whoa, whoa, I know. Controversial stuff I know. I don’t think I’m being too out of line in saying this, and I don’t feel the particular need to prove it. It’s junk food, we’re all intelligent adults and we all make the decision to drink soft drinks knowing full well the health consequences.

Or do we?

Saying that soft drink is bad for you is one thing, but what if I were to tell you that soft drink is bad for you even by junk food standards? You might think soft drinks are fairly okay – sure, they are high in sugar, but they don’t have complex carbs or fats or much in the way of nasty additives, all of which is true. But soft drink does have one thing that hamburgers don’t – a liquid form.

The fact that soft drinks are, well, drinks, is actually fairly significant. Wikipedia tells me that a can of Coke (355 mL, so not a real can but close enough) has 39 grams of sugar in it, which at 1,576 kJ / 100g is a bit over 600 kJ. To put this in more familiar terms, drinking three cans of Coke gives you about the same energy intake as 100g of Arnott’s Shapes (which is over half of one of those boxes). The thing is, eating all those Shapes will leave you feeling pretty full whereas those cans would do little, if anything, to your appetite. Liquid calories count towards your waistline but not to your rumbling stomach. Heck, there’s nothing to stop you from eating 100g of Shapes after drinking three cans of Coke. Well, apart from shame. Or is it pride?

A side effect of this is that companies are able to up the size of bottles without anyone noticing. Per bottle it costs them little to whack on an extra 30%, which means they can increase the price a modest amount, make a good profit while still delivering better value for money to the consumer. The twist is, you are consuming more calories that your hunger doesn’t register. Increasing the size of a burger has an upper limit where most people won’t be able to eat it, so the value for money is less, but soft drinks don’t suffer from this. A bucket of lemonade goes down about as easily as a bucket of water, despite the massive energy difference.

The above two paragraphs are summed up nicely in a graph published in the International Journal of Obesity:

This applies to more than just lemonade and cola. Cordial, juice, even wine and beer suffer from this. Any beverage with energy content greater than zero is just one more way that nature will mess with you.

Which brings me to diet soft drinks. Surely these are the best of both worlds – sweet flavour, zero calories? Ahh, but you are dealing with human bodies and human brains, shaped by millions of years of evolution, during which they were facing the constant threat of starvation. Tricking them is not quite so easy, as it turns out. Here is a dramatization of what happens when you ingest artificial sweetener:

Your brain: Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, oh boy oh boy oh boy! Sweetness? Yes, definite sweetness! I can’t wait to get some of that sugar! Glucose helps me function and gives a nice tickle to the pleasure centres. Sex, sex, sex, sex, hmm, I wonder what’s taking so long. Normally the sugar has hit the bloodstream by now… come on… sex, sex, SEX I TASTED SWEETNESS WTF, what are you playing at, bloodstream? Sex, sex, sugar, sugar, sugar, sex, sugar, sugar SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR!

What a drama queen. But it has every right to be upset – according to both the genes it inherited from our plain-walking ancestors and a lifetime of experience, sweetness is followed by a sugar rush to the brain. If there is sweetness but not sugar, the brain figures something has gone wrong and demands what it was promised, in the form of you craving food.

Don’t believe me? Take this study as an example. Three groups of people were given water, lemonade and artificially-sweetened lemonade, respectively. The next day there was no difference between those who had water or lemonade, but for those who had the artificial sweetener, there was a distinct increase in the amount of carbohydrates consumed. In fact, those who had tried to trick their brains with false promises of sweetness ended up consuming more calories than if they’d just gone for the real stuff to start with. This effect has been reported with artificial sweeteners used in solid food as well.

Which brings me back to the title of this article: how do you drink diet soft drinks? The answer is, you don’t. A number of artificial sweeteners have proven health consequences, and as it turns out, none of them work – trying to eliminate calories through these chemicals leads you to seek out the energy elsewhere. You can pretend that this doesn’t apply to you, that your willpower is stronger than those studied, but you’re wrong. Cutting back on calories requires more cunning and finesse than a simple substitution; it requires a full rethink to how you approach food. Sorry boys and girls, but I’m afraid that like everything else in life, the quick-fixes don’t work.