I'd also consider the possibility that high-achievers realize that drinking calories is hardly ever worth it. And if you want something that tastes like soda but has all the nutritional value of water, Diet Coke is your best option.
Eh. If you want to slightly lower your caloric intake, and you normally eat a 700 calorie lunch... replacing that with 350 calories of protein shake a few times per week and still eating a healthy dinner, etc, is reasonable.
If you just want the protein you can buy unsweetened protein powder and mix it with water. If that's too bland you can add a little juice, still way less calories than the typical bottled protein drink.
Honestly one of the worst things I've ever tasted - I haven't seen them around for years.
Plain protein powder (Optimum Nutrition / whatever you like) is generally mostly protein so if you're good with just chucking it in water you have a nearly equivalent macro breakdown.
YMMV. I LOVED the taste of those (used to get the green tea flavor). I have now switched to an "infusions" variety [0]. Has a better taste (I mix with water) than chocolate in water, and is very refreshing after you let it sit for about a min after shaking.
I use them as a convenient way to guarantee protein and calories, and use them as a way to help hammer out my hunger after the gym. 2-ish scoops, whole milk, mmm. Drink it fast, because it is not meant to be savored.
This is me so long as you consider me a high-achiever. I got addicted to coke when I was young and as an adult I drink lots of Coke Zero (previously Diet Coke) because I can't or don't want to break the habit and I want to preserve every spare calorie I can for desserts. Not gaining weight as I transitioned into an old man required me to severely cut back on my consumption and liquid calories have always been at the top of the list.
The absolute best pipeline is to go Coke -> Diet Coke -> Coke Zero -> Caffeine Free Coke Zero -> colored water -> water, but there is no pipeline at all. It was cancelled, and people should be aware of what they drink and drink mindfully and responsibly.
For me it was Various Kinds of Sugary Soda -> Club Soda or sparkling mineral water sometimes with a squeeze of citrus.
I craved the carbonation more than I craved the sugar, it turns out. Club soda instead of seltzer water because seltzer often has ~0 salt in it, which tastes pretty damn gross when combined with carbonation (to me, anyway)
I find artificial sweeteners intolerable, so skipped that phase, I guess.
One thing is certain: after years of Coke Zero, I've come to dislike regular sugary Coke. It's undrinkable, makes me even thirstier, and the American version with HFCS might be even worse. Also, Coke Zero >> Diet Coke, it's the perfect version of the Coca-Cola formula in my opinion.
The other day I had a sip of some no sugar soda, and I had to double check if I had by mistake bought the full sugar one, it tasted so sweet. Nope, it was sugar free. They're real good these days, though I don't know how healthy.
-- can't drink coke zero or regular coke, regular coke is so disgusting - coke zero is meh - however - easy to knock off 3 or 4 diets cokes in a work day - tastes so good --
It can be very helpful when providing clarity about where a word break should be. There's a reason that Experts Exchange uses http://www.experts-exchange.com rather than the hyphen-free version.
Let me check my spam folder - yeah, there are tons of phishing attempts with unusual combinations of hyphens, no hyphens, and company/inc/group that have similar amounts of legitimacy. A domain of coca-colacompany.com doesn't seem that unusual.
Oh, you mean the
#:~:text=
URI fragment - yeah, that is weird! I wonder what the function of the :~ emoji is in their CMS. I know from painful experience that XML names can begin with a colon [1]; I fear that an identifier which is only a colon features prominently in their schema...
I also enjoyed the line at the bottom, in corporatese nonanswer to the question "Is caffeine addictive?"
> We know that not everyone drinks caffeine and not everyone wants to drink it all the time, so we also offer a range of caffeine-free beverages, including [insert local caffeine-free example] so people can make the choice for them and their families.
Someone in some committee vetoed 'including water', much to the chagrin of the Dasani and Smartwater reps in the meeting... or maybe they were duking it out with the new Aha guy and there was no clear winner yet.
It's not a CMS thing, it's a Chrome thing.[1] It highlights the text in the URI fragment when you click through to the page, and also auto-scrolls to that text.
It appears that Google Search has started to add those text fragments onto URLs in search results. Is there a setting or a browser extension that allows me to get rid of them?
I drink a lot of caffeine free diet coke now that I've developed a caffeine intolerance, and I think you're right. It doesn't have the bite without the caffeine and tastes kind of flat.
Am I the only one that experiences sugar as a depressant? Eating high glycemic index foods makes me lethargic and sleepy. I've never experienced a "sugar high". I also don't have diabetes as my blood sugar level is within norm during routine physicals.
Maybe you just get the insulin spike that deals with excess sugar in the blood much sooner which I think is what is supposed to make you sleepy. Probably should consider yourself lucky :)
Yes, this happens to me too. I can get maybe a maximum 15-20 minutes of increased cognitive performance after ingestion. Once that is over I become lethargic and afterwards a bit irate since my concentration dips.
It bothers me that people like Warren Buffet can go along their day ingesting copious amounts of coke normal and sweets and still be a functional productive human being.
There's a theory out there that since your intestines have 'taste buds' for sugar, that eating artificial sweetener ends up increasing your body's ability to scavenge sugars from your digestive tract.
It's one of the working theories for a causative link between obesity and consumption of diet soda. Which is usually swamped by the correlative link between the two.
I'm curious about this theory. Do you mean by eating the same amount of food, artificial sweetener makes your body more efficient and increases your food utilization rate? For example instead of 80% of calorie now 90% of food is being used by the body? Looks like a good way to save food, you can just eat less for more.
It is probably just overload for you - I get the same thing after a big big meal or a lot of sugar. But a small amount is another story. If you drank the original size of coke (which I think was 8 ounces?) you might have another reaction!
Yep, me too! There is actually a link between high GI and sleepyness; orexin. It's a chemical messenger in the brain, and if you have very little of it, you have narcolepsy. If you have been injected or sprayed with a lot of it, you stay alert without sleep. Oh, and glucose inhibits orexin production!
My personal theory is that I have inherited a low base level of orexin, which makes me react with sleepyness to carbohydrates. I have no idea if this is accurate, though.
I wonder if Im the only person who is triggered by this widespread over-simplification? Relaxed and focussed is not drowsy. Also totally within the normal spectrum of amphetamine effects for anyone, regardless of diagnosis. I always see people parroting this idea. Oh you have ADD so _those drugs_ just make you sleepy yeah? Id be bouncing off the walls, they'd say.
Sugar, despite popular belief, is not a stimulant (I’d have to pull up my Intro Psych textbook to find the citations on this, but it’s been deeply studied).
Similarly, it doesn't make kids hyper. That's probably just a side effect of the environment in which kids typically get candy. There was a study, but I don't know what it was called.
> More concretely, phenylalanine is in all sorts of foods like eggs, chicken, milk, soybeans, and breast milk. Remember how phenylalanine is an essential amino acid? And remember how you’re reading this right now and not dead? From these facts, we may conclude that you consume phenylalanine all the time.
Oh man, this had me chuckling and is a great TLDR for many supplements.
It generally isn't. Some people don't have the ability to metabolize phenylalanine, and it will slowly poison them. However, if this is you, you would definitely know.
> PA level is constantly high because of drinking Diet Coke
I'd probably question if this is even possible in a healthy individual. You probably eat a lot of phenylalanine regularly. My intuition is that you'd really have to go out of your way and actively want to give yourself brain damage to even achieve this.
EDIT: That link probably underscores that the warning label on your coke can is purely for the benefit of Phenylketoneurics, not you. A steak & 2 egg breakfast with a latte would land you with far more phenylalanine than you could sanely consume purely through coke. You'd likely be sick from the caffeine sooner than the phenylalanine.
I found out that when I stop drinking Diet Coke, I get depression symptoms. (Reproduced three times now).
It must have something to do with the aspartame in it. When I take DLPA pills (a breakdown product of aspartame), the depression goes away quite fast. Drinking a can or two of Diet Coke also does the trick.
Try caffeine free and see if it persists. I drink caffeine free.
I’ll be going on a multi month purge from it though. Water only for a few months. It’ll be brutal especially because I have high standards for water. (And most water tastes terrible)
I’m not sure all the attention on caffeine vs caffeine free is deserved, I suspect that a ton of other chemicals are involved. It took me months to get over drinking diet sodas with a ton of withdrawal symptoms along the way, but it was worth it - addiction is terrible.
Stains from diet soda are also way easier to completely clean up due to the lack of sugar! I've seen Diet Coke/Coke Zero stains vanish from light-colored clothing within minutes.
Back in the dot-com days, thanks to employer-subsidized soda fridges, I was drinking easily 6+ cans of diet soda a day (in my case, Diet Dr. Pepper). Along with other startup related behaviors like eating fast food (Carl's Jr, what's up?) and not exercising, my weight increased to around 220 lbs on a 6'1" frame. I stopped drinking diet soda around the time I joined a weight-loss startup in 2011, and started eating healthier and I end up dropping down to around 175 lbs, which I more or less maintain to this day. I personally think "diet soda", even though "0 calories" doesn't do anything great for your metabolism or weight and is a great oxymoron of a product.
What would be the something else? There are occasional studies that may indicate health risks associated with diet soda, but as best as I can tell they are not really conclusive. The health issues with consuming large amounts of refined sugar on the other hand are concrete and very well documented. Dental caries, increased likelihood of developing diabetes mellitus, etc.
It's true that refined sugar has been very clearly proven to be associated with terrible consequences to your health. But most of the sugar substitutes used in "diet" products simply don't have those warnings because they're just newer and less studied. But there's been a lot of recent research showing just how bad these artificial sweeteners can be even in small amounts. Some studies have even shown long-lasting and intergenerational effects on the gut microbiome[0] and increased cancer risks.[1] The impacts on the gut microbiome[2] are particularly worrying to me. Many of these sweeteners love to sit in your gut for a while and can lead to really weird microbiome makeups and possibly even be a risk factor for diabetes and/or metabolic syndromes
Aspartame which is often used for 'diet' drinks is rather crappy chemical stuff you really shouldn't be putting in your body in the first place.
People feel they are doing something for their health when its really not the case since they still remain well within the junkfood category (something akin to using denser filter in cigarettes - less big particles may well mean finer stuff is kept in lungs for longer, and travels deeper)
IHMO you are confusing product marketing with good health advice.
Marketing is just a legal way to tell only the good side of a story.
"low-fat" usually means sugar. "sugar free" usually means artificial sweeteners (or something made without sugar anyway). Even "no added sugar" is suspect.
What I've found hilarious is the new "KETO!" marketing craze. I really suspect that most of these products will not induce or maintain ketosis.
(the actual health impact of ketosis is not clear to me anyway)
A ketogenic diet is ultra-low-carb, to the point where your body enters ketosis, and becomes much more amenable to burning your fat reserves for energy.
Essentially, keto-friendly means very low carb/sugar.
Oh no, the trick is to buy the sirup from a discount supermarket (for example Aldi's Diet Orange soda sirup) and dillute it with water from your sodastream (or sodastream knock-off, also from Aldi). This way you will always know that there are three components in your soda: sirup, tap water and CO2.
It's wild how far we go to keep doing our bad habits. It's like with veganism. That major EAT–Lancet study found that, although vegetarianism and veganism had many positive impacts on measures of environmental impacts, vegetarianism was actually more beneficial than veganism on impact of biodiversity. This is basically because vegans consume more "fake meat" and other such products that require a lot of processing and packaging and end up having a terrible impact on the environment
Curry is great! I do veganism occasionally for periods of time and I personally believe that if you can't do it without craving meat you are just not creative enough. There's plenty of amazing food and flavors out there that don't need meat. Not to mention, you'd probably have a smaller environmental impact by buying some really expensive meat/eggs from some free-range farmer from your local farmer's market than if you buy that fake meat stuff that's probably made of the soybeans grown on the soy farms that are rapidly replacing the Amazon
Between personal experience and Having talked to a lot of weight loss people. Diet sodas seem to increase overall hunger. Making it harder to stick to a good diet.
People have one can lose weight on a Twinkie diet. Doesn’t mean it will work for the 99% of us.
The fact may be that artificial sweeteners may alter your microbiome and cause you to crave more calories as a result [1]
Not to mention the most carcinogenic ingredient? It's the dark caramel coloring, which is why you get in Denmark 'clear cola' from their local brands (North Americans can enjoy some Zevia in this way). I guess that's just burnt sugar off the bottom of a vat or something. [2] Not to mention the phosphoric acid in there for the 'taste', which is a pretty sweet ingredient for stripping rust off of chrome! [3]
I don't know why I still drink this stuff on occasion hahaha. They even take that acid out of stuff like hardware store rust strippers these days.
'Calories in vs calories out' is more meme than myth. It's both true and nearly worthless to aid anyone in weight loss because it's not the thing anyone is confounded by.
Contrary to most opinions here, I lost weight through Diet Coke and diet drinks and kept it down thanks to it. These sodas (or rather the artificial sweeteners) allowed me to cut out sugar totally out of my diet at age 16 where I weighed 250 lbs at my highest, to 140 lbs at my lowest at age 21. Now I'm 30 years old at a healthy 160 lbs. I never worked out (still hate it) and only achieved this thanks to the dietary changes I was able to make through 0-calorie sweeteners. Perhaps my experience differs from other peoples, but I personally know 2-3 other people like me. Today, like most days, I drank at least 80 fl oz of diet soda and it never had a negative effect on me.
I do drink water sometimes. But during the day, when I'm working or out at a restaurant it's 99% diet soda. I haven't tasted sugar based Coke in over 15 years because of my aversion against sugar.
Back when I was losing weight, I was fueled by caffeine, anxiety, and aspartame, so this checks out with my own experience. 270 to 180, sitting now around 205.
I did mostly cardio back then, but now lift weights. Switching to 0-calorie drinks has allowed me to better balance my diet for my personal wants/needs.
My story is pretty much identical, although some of the numbers are a bit different.
At 22 I was a massive 95 kg (210 lbs). I drank about 2 L of cola every day and decided commit myself to a "don't drink calories rule," and switched from regular Coke/Pepsi to Coke Zero/Pepsi Max. I made no other changes to my lifestyle and after 6-7 months was down to a non-overweight 70 kg (155 lbs).
16 years later (yikes!), I still drink too much soda: about 1-1.5 L of diet soda and about 1 L of water. I currently weigh 75 kg, but I think the extra mass comes from much more regular exercise.
I don't have any particular health issues, whatsoever, but after a few decades of daily soda abuse, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
If you hate exercising you might try focusing on something else and use it as a way to get better.
Like I want to shoot in the 80s in golf, run a 7 minute mile or whatever. It helped me find a love for it because it was a way to “train for my goal” rather than an everyday slog.
After about 4 weeks I started to look forward to it and really went down a rabbit hole optimizing workouts, sleep and food.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the cola of coca that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire pits, the pits become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
> 12oz Diet Coke contains 100mg phenylalanine, which is an indirect precursor to dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain.
If "leads to dopamine eventually via some pathway" were sufficient for dopamine, hoo boy, the field of psychopharmacology would look radically different. Would certainly make treating ADHD and Parkinson's way easier (and schizophrenia and mania way harder).
Or, y'know, it's the caffeine. Especially since it doesn't cause the sugar spike/crash like regular soft drinks.
140 comments
[ 366 ms ] story [ 3042 ms ] threadI'd also consider the possibility that high-achievers realize that drinking calories is hardly ever worth it. And if you want something that tastes like soda but has all the nutritional value of water, Diet Coke is your best option.
0 carbs, lactose free. http://www.theisopurecompany.com/en-au/product/isopurezeroca...
They aftertaste is a little weird, but still much easier to drink than protein shakes.
Plain protein powder (Optimum Nutrition / whatever you like) is generally mostly protein so if you're good with just chucking it in water you have a nearly equivalent macro breakdown.
[0]:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FHPGS4V?pd_rd_i=B07FHPGS4V&pf_r...
A scoop of protein powder in water or almond milk might hit 130 calories and will satiate, unlike diet coke.
600 calories, tops.
I craved the carbonation more than I craved the sugar, it turns out. Club soda instead of seltzer water because seltzer often has ~0 salt in it, which tastes pretty damn gross when combined with carbonation (to me, anyway)
I find artificial sweeteners intolerable, so skipped that phase, I guess.
[0]: https://www.sprite.com/products/sprite
The other day I had a sip of some no sugar soda, and I had to double check if I had by mistake bought the full sugar one, it tasted so sweet. Nope, it was sugar free. They're real good these days, though I don't know how healthy.
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/faqs/what-is-caffeine#:~:te....
www.winndixie.com
www.coca-cola.com !!
Oh, you mean the
URI fragment - yeah, that is weird! I wonder what the function of the :~ emoji is in their CMS. I know from painful experience that XML names can begin with a colon [1]; I fear that an identifier which is only a colon features prominently in their schema...I also enjoyed the line at the bottom, in corporatese nonanswer to the question "Is caffeine addictive?"
> We know that not everyone drinks caffeine and not everyone wants to drink it all the time, so we also offer a range of caffeine-free beverages, including [insert local caffeine-free example] so people can make the choice for them and their families.
Someone in some committee vetoed 'including water', much to the chagrin of the Dasani and Smartwater reps in the meeting... or maybe they were duking it out with the new Aha guy and there was no clear winner yet.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-NameStartChar
[1] https://web.dev/text-fragments/
It bothers me that people like Warren Buffet can go along their day ingesting copious amounts of coke normal and sweets and still be a functional productive human being.
It's one of the working theories for a causative link between obesity and consumption of diet soda. Which is usually swamped by the correlative link between the two.
My personal theory is that I have inherited a low base level of orexin, which makes me react with sleepyness to carbohydrates. I have no idea if this is accurate, though.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expe...
It could occur even if fasting blood glucose is still at normal levels.
Oh man, this had me chuckling and is a great TLDR for many supplements.
Essential means you both need it to live and your body can't make it on its own - you must get it from diet.
I'd probably question if this is even possible in a healthy individual. You probably eat a lot of phenylalanine regularly. My intuition is that you'd really have to go out of your way and actively want to give yourself brain damage to even achieve this.
Given this: https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-phenylalanine-foods... which shows chicken breast has 2190mg and your average can of diet coke has around 104 mg https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1617863/, I think that probably holds.
EDIT: That link probably underscores that the warning label on your coke can is purely for the benefit of Phenylketoneurics, not you. A steak & 2 egg breakfast with a latte would land you with far more phenylalanine than you could sanely consume purely through coke. You'd likely be sick from the caffeine sooner than the phenylalanine.
Perhaps this started as a Diet Coke marketing viral campaign?
It's the first line of the article.
It must have something to do with the aspartame in it. When I take DLPA pills (a breakdown product of aspartame), the depression goes away quite fast. Drinking a can or two of Diet Coke also does the trick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_dependence
I’ll be going on a multi month purge from it though. Water only for a few months. It’ll be brutal especially because I have high standards for water. (And most water tastes terrible)
It also does help with your health if you were going to consume the non-diet version of that product in similar quantities.
Disagree with this. Its marketing BS to focus on one diet optimization usually at the expense of something else.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.79584...
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25231862/
More reading:
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/artificial-sweeteners-su...
- https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
People feel they are doing something for their health when its really not the case since they still remain well within the junkfood category (something akin to using denser filter in cigarettes - less big particles may well mean finer stuff is kept in lungs for longer, and travels deeper)
Marketing is just a legal way to tell only the good side of a story.
"low-fat" usually means sugar. "sugar free" usually means artificial sweeteners (or something made without sugar anyway). Even "no added sugar" is suspect.
What I've found hilarious is the new "KETO!" marketing craze. I really suspect that most of these products will not induce or maintain ketosis.
(the actual health impact of ketosis is not clear to me anyway)
Essentially, keto-friendly means very low carb/sugar.
"keto crackers", "keto bombs", "keto clusters", "mini cookies", "keto cups", etc...
I suspect they must be sharply constrained in serving size
You will end up with 1-2 cans of diet soda heavily diluted by water.
After you get used to it, ordinary canned soda will start tasting like the carbonated syrup it actually is.
Curry is great! I do veganism occasionally for periods of time and I personally believe that if you can't do it without craving meat you are just not creative enough. There's plenty of amazing food and flavors out there that don't need meat. Not to mention, you'd probably have a smaller environmental impact by buying some really expensive meat/eggs from some free-range farmer from your local farmer's market than if you buy that fake meat stuff that's probably made of the soybeans grown on the soy farms that are rapidly replacing the Amazon
People have one can lose weight on a Twinkie diet. Doesn’t mean it will work for the 99% of us.
Not to mention the most carcinogenic ingredient? It's the dark caramel coloring, which is why you get in Denmark 'clear cola' from their local brands (North Americans can enjoy some Zevia in this way). I guess that's just burnt sugar off the bottom of a vat or something. [2] Not to mention the phosphoric acid in there for the 'taste', which is a pretty sweet ingredient for stripping rust off of chrome! [3]
I don't know why I still drink this stuff on occasion hahaha. They even take that acid out of stuff like hardware store rust strippers these days.
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/artificial-sweeteners-can-...
[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/289687
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7OdX42NjWQ
I'm not sure how you can distinguish between the effect of the change to the drinks and the effect of the other changes.
Personally, I've gone from drinking 6+ cans of Diet Coke a day to 1-2 plus water with no other changes and noticed no effect from it.
Never had a kidney stone or anything like it.
I did mostly cardio back then, but now lift weights. Switching to 0-calorie drinks has allowed me to better balance my diet for my personal wants/needs.
At 22 I was a massive 95 kg (210 lbs). I drank about 2 L of cola every day and decided commit myself to a "don't drink calories rule," and switched from regular Coke/Pepsi to Coke Zero/Pepsi Max. I made no other changes to my lifestyle and after 6-7 months was down to a non-overweight 70 kg (155 lbs).
16 years later (yikes!), I still drink too much soda: about 1-1.5 L of diet soda and about 1 L of water. I currently weigh 75 kg, but I think the extra mass comes from much more regular exercise.
I don't have any particular health issues, whatsoever, but after a few decades of daily soda abuse, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Like I want to shoot in the 80s in golf, run a 7 minute mile or whatever. It helped me find a love for it because it was a way to “train for my goal” rather than an everyday slog.
After about 4 weeks I started to look forward to it and really went down a rabbit hole optimizing workouts, sleep and food.
It can be really fun!
https://mobile.twitter.com/AaronBergman18/status/15273336157...
> 12oz Diet Coke contains 100mg phenylalanine, which is an indirect precursor to dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain.
If "leads to dopamine eventually via some pathway" were sufficient for dopamine, hoo boy, the field of psychopharmacology would look radically different. Would certainly make treating ADHD and Parkinson's way easier (and schizophrenia and mania way harder).
Or, y'know, it's the caffeine. Especially since it doesn't cause the sugar spike/crash like regular soft drinks.