I used to have a 120 fluid oz a day habit of diet soda. Yes - you heard that right. I had a large 64 ounce insulated cup and could refill it at the 7-11 right next to my job for 99 cents. I'd drink 2 a day. One or two 12 oz cans after work. Accounting for ice I figure around 120 oz a day.

I experienced no negative effects from this large consumption that I know of. This went on for a couple years.

When I decided to get healthy I read a lot about diet soda being bad so I quit soda completely. I didn't feel any better.

I still suspect diet soda is not good for you so I keep consumption relatively low. (Relative to my own standard lol) I drink 1 or 2 cans of diet coke a day.

One thing I don't believe is the idea that diet soda increases insulin levels. Based on the research I've done and studies I've read diet soda does not raise insulin levels. If it did - I would have gone into a diabetic coma drinking all that diet soda on an empty stomach.

What I find ironic is the number of people in my life criticizing my artificial sweetener use as "ingesting harmful chemicals" who use thousands of dangerous chemicals, even known carcinogens in their daily life and thinkg "that's different" because they're spreading them on their skin, breathing them in, rather than swallowing them. They use cosmetics and chemical cleansers, they clean their bodies, clothes, cars, and home with solvents known to be carcinogens and fill the air they breathe with solid, spray, and oil fragrances. They think "that's different" because they're breathing them, or wearing them rather than swallowing them.

These are chemicals which have been proven unsafe (by the same supposedly "biased" organizations that has found artificial sweeteners safe). These companies have just as much money or more as those who manufacture artificial sweeteners - heck sometimes they're the same company. It makes no sense to say these organizations are responding to pressure from the companies to find a product safe, or they would have said the same thing about the other products. Instead, those products contain warning labels so long they should scare people away from the product (and yet it doesn't).

If I wanted to be as safe as possible from man-made chemicals as possible, I'd have to move to the Canadian wildnerness and live without modern conveniences (and then I'd still risk death and illness by natural causes, and lack of access to medical help).

My own experiment with sweeteners, is about six years ago, I gave up caffeine altogether and artificial sweeteners almost entirely. (A coworker had half-convinced me that my fibromyalgia was caused by artificial sweeteners and caffeine).

At the end of almost a year, I was still feeling a lot more fatigue than was functional, and I talked to my doctor about it, and he told me that I should reintroduce caffeine into my diet. I'm not a big fan of coffee or tea, and I asked the doc abour diet soda. He said if I was going to experience a negative reaction to either the caffeine or the artificial sweetener, it would be immediately noticeable when I started it back up. He warned specifically about headaches.

I didn't experience any ill effects, and in fact the caffeine did help me with relatively side-effect free alertness (as long as I stop using caffeine by 3pm or so).

I never returned to my old level of diet soda drinking (at work I always would have one in my hand - mostly because the fatigue of the fibro/cfs was so bad only a constant influx of caffeine kept me conscious), but I don't have any problem with my current use (Usually 1 or 2 cans most days. Often less, and sometimes more).

I'm not concerned with my sweetener use, because of my own experience and review of the research.

For the same reason, I avoid most common household chemicals, mostly because I wasn't used to them (my family used relatively few as I grew up - vinegar and water was used to clean almost everything. My father has severely sensitive skin and so even laundry soap had to be very gentle).

I use very few soaps, lotions and cosmetics and fragrances, and am careful with ones I buy. Ironically it's a "natural" substance that I have the most trouble with. I am allergic to beeswax (my lips swell and burn and I get a sore throat if there's even a trace of beeswax in a product).

A lot of people say "if you can't pronounce it don't eat it," and decide that ingredients must be scary ingredients because they don't know what they are. I've had to educate friends and relatives that some of the "scary additives" they were avoiding were actually vitamins and natural ingredients - such as the vitamins niacin, riboflavin, folic acid...

I can never remember which ones I've read, but there are a lot of great guides on amazon.com just search using the words food additive guide


I've heard good things about The Nutrition Bible: The Comprehensive, No-Nonsense Guide to Foods, Nutrients, Additives, Preservatives, Pollutants, and Everything Else We Eat and by Jean Anderson and Barbara Deskins (Paperback - Oct 1995)