@HelloRaptor said:
You likely shouldn't be drinking diet sodas even if you are diabetic; studies suggest that consuming diet sodas may increase insulin resistance.
Which studies? Do you have any links? I've heard this before but the sum total of wading through the studies I have found come down to: Drinking diet soda frequently seems to lead to an unhealthy lifestyle and dietary decisions that contribute to blah blah blah.
Like so.
Essentially:
Despite accumulating evidence of the existence of these associations , we are cautious not to conclude causality between diet soda and the diabetic or pre-diabetic condition. The possibility of confounding by other dietary and lifestyle/behavioral factors cannot be excluded from these observational studies.
We're looking at the same study but drawing different conclusions. What I found later on in the conclusions of that article is that
daily diet soda consumption was associated with significantly greater risks of two metabolic syndrome components (incident high waist circumference and fasting glucose) and type 2 diabetes in this large, multi-ethnic cohort. These results corroborate findings from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities and Framingham studies and show that stronger adverse associations exist between diet soda and type 2 diabetes. Diet soda consumption, either independently or in conjunction with other dietary and lifestyle behaviors, may lead to weight gain, impaired glucose control, and eventual diabetes.
Now, my claim that there is some mechanism that links artificial sweeteners with insulin resistance was just sloppy. This study says about that:
Could artificial sweetener (the constituent unique from sugar-sweetened soda) adversely affect biological processes related to insulin resistance, glucose regulation, and adiposity? Over the life of the MESA cohort, several artificial sweeteners for sweetening diet beverages have been used by the soda industry. The sweeteners most commonly used in diet beverages had also changed from the initiation of MESA to the most recent examination. These dynamics make it difficult to attribute our findings to the biological effects of a particular artificial sweetener. Mechanistic studies in randomized, controlled settings addressing how artificial sweeteners consumed from diet beverages affect early markers of metabolic dysfunction are lacking (especially considering true-to-life exposure to multiple sweeteners). Data such as ours and those that preceded ours (1,2), suggest that such research is warranted. Current literature articles provide data on single sweeteners only, mostly aspartame (12,14,16,17,19–24), with a few using saccharin (11,16), and none using sucralose, which was more recently introduced to the beverage market. Only one study used a combination of artificial sweeteners (but did not include sucralose) (15), and no studies were long term nor did they include measures of glycemic control or insulin sensitivity.
So, it could be argued that if you already have type-2 diabetes and are carefully watching your weight and keeping your waist under control (since there does seem to be a association between midsection fat and insulin resistance), then you should be able to drink artificially sweetened sodas without any problems. I still don't drink them, but I had stopped drinking sodas altogether a decade before I developed type-2 diabetes just because I lost my taste for them. I also was never more than 20 lbs. overweight, but that extra weight was and still is at my gut. Probably for me it was a combination of diet, inactivity, and really crappy genetics: only two of seven male siblings including my father lived past age 60, with all of the rest suffering from hypertension and extremely high cholesterol although not all of them were overweight.
