The dangers of diet soda

It's not always easy to make healthy choices, especially with fancy marketing and sexy food and drink products everywhere you turn.
But one so-called "healthy" choice you may make is drinking diet soda instead of the regular calorie alternative.

After all, if the label on the bottle says "diet", it has to be better for you than the real stuff. Right? Wrong! Loads of research shows that drinking diet soda won't help you fight fat. And even worse than that, the chemicals in diet soda can lead to all sorts of serious health problems, from diabetes, to high blood pressure, to kidney problems, and more. It turns out that the dangers of diet soda are many...

Diet soda is packed with artificial sweeteners that can confuse your body's natural ability to manage calories. But worse than that, drinking diet soda has been linked to serious health problems. Health dangers of diet soda include:

Heart disease
A study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that diet soda drinkers were at greater risk for vascular health defects, such as heart attacks and strokes.

Type 2 Diabetes
The American Diabetes Association found that people who drank diet soda are at increased risk of diabetes by 67%.

Kidney problems
A study published in Harvard Medical School's Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology found that women who drank 2 or more cans of soda per day were more likely to suffer decline in kidney function.

Obesity
Several studies have shown an association with people who drink diet soda and metabolic syndrome. To say it in another way, diet soda drinkers are more likely to be obese, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a larger waistline. Don't you think it's funny it's called "diet" soda, now?

Bad teeth
Although regular soda may be worse for your teeth, diet soda can still do damage. The high acidity of diet sodas causes erosion, resulting in weak, ugly and unhealthy teeth.

Pre-term delivery
In a study of nearly 60,000 Danish pregnant women, researchers found that those women who drank diet soda were at increased risk of pre-term delivery. It didn't matter if the women were overweight or regular weight. And guess what else they found? There was no correlation for preterm delivery and women who drank regular, sugar-sweetened sodas....so there's something in the "diet" that is causing this problem.