To all my friends out there who live on Diet Coke, I apologize in advance.

I couldn’t help but notice the beverages people were drinking in our OR lounge recently.  There were a lot of coffee drinkers, an occasional tea drinker, and a rare water drinker, but the majority of people were drinking soft drinks.  In particular, they were drinking Diet Coke.  It made me curious… so I decided to do a little research.

When you do a PubMed search on diet drinks, you get 1372 articles.  I’m not pretending that I could do a real scientific review, and I’m sure there are flaws in some of these studies…  but it’s enough to make you think twice about drinking diet drinks.

Here’s some of what I discovered ….

• The pH of most diet drinks is about 3.0 (vinegar is 2.5)

• What’s in diet drinks is scary

• High soft drink ingestion and a low intake of fruits and vegetables are associated with  the metabolic syndrome.

• Drinking one diet soda a day is linked to an increased risk for the metabolic syndrome.

• Drinking diet soda is linked with increased weight gain (not weight loss)

• Daily intake of artificially sweetened drinks increases the risk of preterm labor

• Diet drinks may increase the risk of osteoporosis

• Diet drink consumption may cause injury to the kidney