(Mercola.com) Diet soda is often perceived as being “healthier” than regular soft drinks because it contains artificial sweeteners in lieu of sugar, and therefore has no calories [...] but, while I do not recommend you drink any soda, if given the choice, between regular soda and diet, the regular soda would likely be less damaging to your health.
In fact, before you reach for another can, you might want to get up to speed on the latest research, which shows that drinking diet soda results in an increased risk of vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death. Diet soda can be addictive, so if you need incentive and motivation to quit this habit, ask yourself whether the pleasure you get from drinking it is worth having a stroke. This is a very real scenario, as researchers found that people who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent more likely to have suffered a vascular event, including a stroke. This significant association persisted even after controlling for other factors that could increase the risk, such as smoking, physical activity levels, alcohol consumption, diabetes, heart disease, dietary factors and more.
According to the authors:
“This study suggests that diet soda is not an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages, and may be associated with a greater risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, or vascular death than regular soda. Vascular events like strokes and heart attacks typically occur suddenly without any warning, which is why prevention is so important. I like to refer to the most common type of stroke as a brain attack, which is similar to a heart attack; the only difference is that the blood clot blocks blood flow to your brain instead of your heart. As a result, brain cells begin to die. Naturally, the longer your brain goes without oxygen, the greater your risk of lasting brain damage.”
