You Ask, I Answer: Diet Soda

What are your feelings towards diet soda, especially those that use aspartame as a sweetener?
-- Hektor Suhr

Although I don't advocate diet soda (I would never recommend it to someone who doesn't drink or like it), I also am not about to throw a bucket of corn syrup on the next celebrity featured in Diet Coke's latest ad campaign.

As far as aspartame goes, the jury is still out as far as I am concerned. It is obviously legal to have in the food supply, but there haven't been many long-term studies done with it. There is no reason to panic and completely avoid it, but I also wouldn't feel 100% kosher downing 4 Diet Cokes a day, every day.

My biggest issue with any soda (regular or diet) is the presence of phosphoric acid.

See, our bodies like to stay in balance (you might remember the term “homeostasis” from your high school biology class). Calcium and phosphate, in particular, are two minerals that are actually good buddies.

In fact, they’re inseparable. If one’s level in our blood goes up, the other one wants to go up as well. So when you drink that can of diet soda, your body's phosphate levels rise. Calcium sees this, and says, "Wait a second, I want to go up, too!"

If you are like most people in the United States, your calcium intake isn’t as high as it needs to be, meaning you don’t have much available calcium floating around. So, in order to up its levels, calcium -- eager to join phosphate -- starts leeching extra calcium from the first place where it can find it – our bones.

Let me be very clear here – if your calcium intake is good, the occasional diet soda is not going to harm you or make you develop osteoporosis. But, in looking at teenagers, many of whom are already calcium deficient and on top of that are guzzling down two or three sodas a day, this is a problem.

Although we don’t see the physical consequences of osteoporosis until middle age, this silent disease starts when we are young, especially if our body is constantly leeching calcium out of our bones! If you absolutely must have diet soda every day, you need to sure you are getting sufficient calcium to prevent your bones from losing this crucial mineral.

My other issue with diet soda is that it usually triggers unhealthy cravings (potato chips, pretzels, buttery popcorn, hamburgers, French fries, etc). When was the last time you were jonesing for a fruit salad and a Diet Pepsi?