What One Sip of Diet Soda Does to Your Brain

diet soda the cure for the common cold just another guilty pleasure you'd think this would be a pretty cut-and-dried case on the one hand we've got a fizzy fun candy drink with some questionable numbers on the label but on the other hand we've got a fizzy fun candy drink that has weight nothing well close to nothing anyway what could go wrong well I wouldn't be here if it wasn't complicated diet sodas don't have the same reputation as lemon cleanses chances are if you've opted for a diet drink with friends around you've gotten more of an earful than a mouthful regarding that sweet treat despite having an image as a healthier tasty beverage alternative diet sodas have always been challenged by claims of being well anything but what are these allegations where do they come from get cozy folks we've got some stories to pour over and a couple of suspects booked in for an appearance tonight but first we're taking a look at an issue from a variety of perspectives chances are we'll get more than a few answers so once again we're not trying to tell you what is or isn't healthy if you're drinking something chances are there's a label on the back or a website to learn more information this is meant to be an unbiased approach to a controversial subject with that out of the way let's get into it sodas are a sweet drink containing carbonated water and flavoring I'm told they're a refreshing crisp beverage but I wouldn't know personally I don't touch the stuff not hot enough we'll be focusing on diet sodas particularly for this episode but it wouldn't be research if we didn't start at the source so let's briefly skim over the history of carbonated beverages the first batch of artificially produced carbon into liquids was manufactured in the late seventeen hundreds but hot dang if the Greeks weren't already curious about it two thousand years before that after noticing what they thought were medicinal benefits from the naturally carbonated water springs the Greeks and clever as they were couldn't repre who knows why I guess they were too busy revolutionising the realm of art and science so a couple of millennia later in 1767 English separatists theologist natural philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley accidentally invented it little foreshadowing this won't be the last time someone accidentally invents something in this video nationally carbonated beverages had already existed we knew considering not just the spring water mentioned before but the many fermented alcoholic drinks across history but Priestley had constructed a lab environment capable of bringing carbonation to water without fermenting a bunch of produce a barrel people were pretty excited about this in fact in 1775 a Scottish physician named John Knuth liked it so much he said hey I love this machine you've built really I could love the fizzy water do not like the urine taste though I might try to get the pig bladder out of the blueprints so he made a better version because nothing says improvement like we made it taste less like pee and sent word to Priestley about his findings Priestley wasn't thrilled taking personal offence to his original design I don't have a direct tap on how we responded but it was sort of like this doesn't taste like urine Yas tastes like urine I bet your servants urinated in it My servants don't do that ok I'm paraphrasing but that last bit was a true accusation naturally it didn't take too long for the dust to settle and for Priestley to admit that Knuth had in fact improved upon his original design and wouldn't you know it the world thought so too so it became wildly popular as time went on folks started improving on that design even further getting creative with ingredients sometimes a little too creative with ingredients oh well we're getting a little too close to losing side of the story there will be some links to a few videos below if you want more on this part of sarah's history but for now let's fast forward a bit to the 19th century alright so sodas are great people love them as a sweet drinkable treat but when we all love to have our cake and eat it too and eat that cake with soda well never you fear because along came a Russian chemist named Constantin Fahlberg who proceeded to revolutionize the soda industry with coal-tar derivatives 1 right remember when we were talking about accidental discoveries history will remember Fahlberg as the man who discovered an Hydra ortho self amine vetted zoic acid the compound known best today has saccharin but it's how he discovered it that's truly wonderful well let the man speak for himself in an interview he did with Scientific American July 17th 1886 quote one evening so interested in my laboratory that I forgot about supper until quite late then rushed off for a meal without stopping to wash my hands i sat down broke a piece of bread and put my lips it tastes unspeakably sweet i rinsed my mouth with water and dried my moustache with my napkin when to my surprise the napkin tastes sweeter than the bread I again raised my goblet and as fortune would have it applied my mouth where my fingers had touched it before it flashed upon me it was the cause of a singular universal sweetness and I accordingly tasted the end of my thumb and found that it had surpassed any confectionery I had discovered or made some coal tar substance which out sugared sugar I dropped my dinner and ran back to the laboratory yeah fall Berg's a taste first ask questions later sort of guy not at all advisable but dang if I don't respect the hood spot but yeah wash your hands folks the good news is Fahlberg hands weren't covered in a dangerous chemical but instead the concoction that would later be known as sacrum a pioneer compound in the world of artificial sweeteners artificial sweeteners or sugar substitutes are a food additive that has the potential to through plenty of research and experimentation replace natural ingredients the first example of a diet soda was in 1952 where no Cal a diet drink that you won't find on the convenience store these days use saccharin as a core ingredient to replace sugar he was invented primarily as an alternative drink to diabetics but was surely thereafter buried under the colossal influence of sodas big league players like pepsi and coke as they stepped into the diet soda market saccharin me of pioneered the path for artificial sweeteners but today it is among a variety of options and it would be almost entirely replaced by aspartame in 1982 as it served to be a more palatable alternative that maintained the same no calorie benefit today aspartame is joined by other sugar replacing compounds like stevia or sucralose but in 1982 it heralded a turning point for the soda industry [Music] yes I was got that no sweetener over its sweeping the planet Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi would be the juggernauts that came the most from it in considering their popularity today it seems like the switch from saccharin was a smart move while Coke and Pepsi certainly maintained their spot as the royal family of diet drinks there certainly is no shortage of options when it comes to sugar free beverages sprite Fanta Mountain Dew ginger ale if there's a fizzy drink behind the counter then there's an equal chance that there's a diet variant of it as well but what is it exactly about diet soda that has people concerned aspartame or saccharine or what's the other one sucralose yeah which by the way those have all been shown to like screw up the microbiome yeah those are research continues about how these sweeteners affect appetite conditions such as asthma lymphomas and leukemia brain tumors and brain cancer irritable bowel syndrome Parkinson's multiple sclerosis and epilepsy saccharin during its heyday wasn't just critiqued for it's less than palatable aftertaste many also considered it a potential carcinogen primarily around 1981 again smart move Coke and Pepsi though studies since then have proven those claims to be false but some things never change there's still an argument to be made not just over the health benefits to artificial sweeteners but the health of risks while diet soda may have originally been marketed as an alternative drink for diabetic individuals rodent studies in recent years have indicated that there's a potential link between diabetes and artificial sweeteners though there are also arguments against the nature of these studies both due to the long-standing argument that rodent studies are not a hundred percent accurate imitations of the human body and the growing concern over a concept known as reverse causation which supports the idea that those who are aware of their own personal risk towards diabetes or heart stroke will be more likely to drink diet soda resulting in some of the data being debated on both sides another argument relates to how artificial sweeteners affect not just body but our brain as well our brain has to check in whenever we eat something in order to relay the message to the rest of the body on just how to digest the foreign material in the case of say something sweet the brain goes right that's going to be high in calories better let the pancreas know about that and the pancreas is like oh dang something sweet eh alright look at the boys and the boys are like we're insulin we store sugar in the cells before energy all right I ran out of steam with the story but you get the idea so what happens when you introduce something that is artificially sweet well the brain calls the pancreas the pancreas hits up the insulin and the insulin does nothing because there's no sugar to store it's like spending the day preparing for a birthday party only to have and nobody's show up that might be a fun practical joke to pull the first few times but scientists think that this kind of regulated trickery could lead to something known as metabolic syndrome which when we go down the list of potential conditions does raise some all-too-familiar risks including diabetes heart disease and stroke another point about metabolic syndrome is the theory that the introduction of this trick of the mind could play a hand in how our bodies metabolize actual calories all of these concerns certainly lead one to ask our diet soda is bad for you well if our research has shown us anything today it's that above all else they're certainly not good for you because at the end of the day whether it's got sugar or artificial sweetener or anything in between soda is a treat but treats are okay rewarding yourself can do a great deal toward personal motivation and a purely chemical level tasting something sweet or sugary can feel pretty dang nice so if diet soda falls into the same category as regular soda is there even a reason to drink something sugar-free at all well sure why not bodies are unique every one of them perhaps yours absorbs particular nutrients in a way that would better digest artificial sweeteners rather than raw sugar I mean that reason alone is how diet drinks were even marketed in the first place though frankly speaking no soda is the best kind of soda when we're getting down to the brass tacks on healthy drinks just like candy or snacks there's really no Universal benefit to be found in regular volumes but should you feel guilty about the odds sip here or there particularly if you've been careful to practice a healthy lifestyle elsewhere in your life well really that's up for you to decide treats are not inherently awful things and the quality of life they can provide are just as measurable as anything else on the label just as true as anything in life moderation is key you can have your coke and drink it too just maybe not 13 every day all right

Channel: Brew

Views: 3,005,982

Rating: 4.6914744 out of 5

Keywords: diet soda, diet soda health, diet coke, diet coke vs coke, diet soda vs regular soda, diet soda weight gain, diet soda weight loss, diet soda bad for you, diet soda health risks, diet coke health, diet coke healthy, is diet soda good for you, is diet pepsi good for you, is diet coke good for you, solved mysteries, unsolved, unsolved mysteries, unsolved cases, mystery, unsolved mystery, investigation, investigate, theory, mysteries unsolved, mysteries solved, solved mystery

Id: 4whqxU8qrXE

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Silverseren]

You can find the channel's "sources" in the description of the video. They are almost entirely other Youtube videos (and mostly soda ads at that, so not science) and only one or two cherrypicked actual studies that don't even back up their claims.

And of the sources and clips used in the video, they include pseudoscience channels like Mercola and Joe Rogan.

Best to keep an eye on this one, it's been growing rapidly over the past two months (from 2k to over 20k).

[u/DeafStudiesStudent]

Is he using the same styling as Real Engineering?

[u/Direclaw777]

Watched the entire video, not even a single outlandish claim. The entire message seems to be "Don't abuse this substance, it may have heath risks associated with it". The only fear-mongering part is the clickbaity title.