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Metabolic Syndrome Is Tied to Diet Soda

by comoms | February 7, 2008 at 04:49 pm | 677 views | 1 comment

This is suprising. We are all aware of the health risks associated with regular soda, but diet soda? There has long been a wonder if some of the chemicals in diet soda might have side effects, but the theories were geard more towards some type of cancer and not metabolic syndrome/diabetes symptoms.

Unfortunately the articles ends with a question about what is causing these problems. But it does leave open the fact that it may be the diet of some of the test subjects instead of the soda.

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men
and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years.

Over
all, a Western dietary pattern — high intakes of refined grains, fried
foods and red meat — was associated with an 18 percent increased risk
for metabolic syndrome, while a “prudent” diet dominated by fruits,
vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk.

But the one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk
by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and
surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent
higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with
those who drank none.

“This is interesting,” said Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper,
which was posted online in the journal Circulation on Jan. 22. “Why is
it happening? Is it some kind of chemical in the diet soda, or
something about the behavior of diet soda drinkers?”