So my family wants me to stop drinking diet pop...

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Point-by-point sound-off:

-I couldn't move the left side of my face on Friday, so I went to the hospital.

-After a clear CT scan and physical, Dr. said it was an open-and-shut case of Bell's Palsy. (A temporary paralysis of the face, caused in this case by latent chicken-pox virus)

-Doctor assured me it was a) nothing to do with stroke or heart-attack, and b) utterly, completely not environmental, at all. Nothing to do with pesticides, or aspartame.

-Then it started: The calls. Oh god, the goddamn calls, and the goddamn lecture:

"This is a warning sign, not a lot of people get a warning!"
"That stuff is bad for you, and we don't know everything about the human body"
"Doctors can be wrong, you know!"
"My cousin/aunt/nephew/niece/roommate got diagnosed with Bell's Palsy, three weeks later they had a stroke and died!"
"You have to make a serious choice about your health!"

-The only people who believe aspartame is harmful are gullible idiots who think Wikipedia, Time magazine, the Lancet, the Mayo Clinic, and the FDA of every English speaking nation on Earth are all lying, but some tinfoil-hatted, crystal-loving, patchouli-drenched hippie is an irrefutable source.

-I drink between 1-4 litres of diet pop a day. I do not want to give it up.

-I don't smoke, hardly drink, don't do drugs, don't like sweets or candy.

-Diet Pepsi is totally and completely and unabashedly: my addiction, and my crutch. I drink it to get through the day. The hardest thing about Asperger's is dealing with people. I hate, no, I HATE, no I @#$%^& HATE dealing with PEOPLE!! !! !! ! That bottle of caffeinated bubbly awesome is the only thing keeping me from angrily lashing out at everyone from the stranger on the street who keeps looking at me and doesn't tell me why, to the old lady with the seventeen surgeries lined up who chooses me to sit beside on the bus and tell her tales of woe in lurid detail, to my co-workers who only seem to ever speak to me when it needs to be done 5 hours ago, to my friends who are all richer, happier, smarter, and get laid more than me, and are all MISERABLE, to my spouse who seems to need EVERYTHING repeated to him in a slow, even tone seven times before it sinks in, and to every jerk I ever meet ever! And it isn't even for THEIR benefit! It's for MINE!! !! !! I HATE this about myself! I HATE that I am an emotional powder-keg with all the self-control of an incontinent puppy! I HATE that I am pathetically easy to emotionally manipulate! and I HATE GETTING UPSET AT ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!! !! !! !! !!

....so I drink some @#$%ing diet pepsi, and I calm the #$%^ down....so that I can function in this lame-ass sham we call society...

...and now they want to take that away from me.

...why?

I've had plenty of people tell me that diet soda is bad for you, but none of them ever bother telling me why.

Yeah, it's not exactly sensitive to say it really slow like your dumb as mud. That can be annoying. Nurses and doctors with cancer patients on air tanks still smoke.

Diet is less sweet tasting too, yeah? I don't know if it has sugar. I could check the can I have in the fridge. ... sec... *a few seconds later* It says zero G. Some article claimed that soda leeched calcium out of bones. Hmm. Ok. I also heard it was water, with gas, and flavored syrup. Not any better than sugar still.

There was this book titled something like "skinny b$%#". She thought milk leeched calcium from bones, and that doctors knew nothing about the human diet. (facepalm) That made me mad, so I ripped apart the book, stomped on it, and threw it away. You just can't seem to be able to trust very many people these days.

You're much better off giving up the sodas. It is nothing but a bunch of stupid chemicals.

The worst chemicals are corn syrup and phosphoric acid. In the simplest terms, the corn syrup makes you fat, and the phosphoric acid rots your teeth.

Even the artificial sweeteners may not be good for you, but not for the reasons cited in the OP. It's better to drink water or pure fruit juices.







... says the man who just finished his fourth cup of coffee today...

Blech...just thinking about diet soda makes me want a cigarette to get the taste out of my mouth.


Do whatever you want, life is short. What good is a life lived denying yourself the little pleasures that make you happy? f**k 'em if they can't take a joke.

Diet Pops have alot of caffeine in them... often more then their non-diet counterpart. There was another post here that talked about caffeine acting like some medications for ADHD. I'm no doctor, but, it may have a similar effect on helping you deal with people.

I'm with you though, don't stop just because someone has some cockamamie idea that what your drinking is going to kill you. Everyone seems to think everything is going to kill you these days, and yet we are all still alive, living longer and longer

hehe... I used cockamamie in a post

I wouldn't listen to those who tell you to stop drinking your soda. It has to be better than the crap that doctors routinely prescribe. On the other hand, the ones who called seem to be genuinely concerned about you.

It's your life and your health, your desicions.

see answer under "aspartame, cola safety, stroke risk"

i accidentally hit the wrong tab, meant to reply, started a new topic instead.

sorry for any inconvenience.

I'd really rather just drink Coffee.

Mostly because Diet Soda tastes awful.

I'm not a big fan of soda pop of any kind, but honestly, the aspartame IS a bad thing. It has been proven to cause memory problems, weight GAIN (yes, even though it's in "diet" soda), and some say it causes cancer.

Believe me, I don't listen to half the rhetoric in the news about "_______ causes ___________ and it'll kill you!! !" and the public panic tactics that they come up with, but Aspartame isn't a fake threat. I quit the aspartame about 5 years ago, and I definitely gained back some memory function that I thought I had lost due to normal aging. I also lost weight after I quit, and felt generally better, and my blood pressure went down. So with all that, I have to agree that the aspartame is a bad thing, and I don't want it ever again myself, and I don't know why anyone else would either, if they see what I saw.

Personally I drink ONLY water, but if I did drink soda, I'd just go with regular old sugar. It's good for you in moderation (assuming you're non-diabetic), has no fat*, and doesn't cause any damage.

Bell's Palsy is an anomaly that just happens sometimes, and people do mistake it for stroke symptoms, and it can come with a stroke too. I've never heard of anything related to food or drink, nor chemicals therein, having any effect on getting a case of Bell's Palsy. Next time someone makes one of those calls to you, tell them to "Get their facts straight", and tell them you'll listen to legitimate concerns about Aspartame, but "kindly don't embellish or invent, to get their point across". That's about like if somebody overweight gets a broken arm from a car accident, and people call up and ride them about losing weight or something, insinuating that the body fat level caused the accident or the bone to break .



Charles

*Sugar doesn't contain fat, but your body will convert it to be stored in fat cells if you eat too much of it.

The preservatives that they put into most diet drinks can be quite harmful too. There has been studies to show that they can cause hyperactivity in susceptible people and I suspect they do more damage than has been discovered so far. I'm allergic to a range of preservatives (sodium benzoate, etc) and can't take diet drinks at all and some of the regular stuff as well, but I don't mind.

This might be of some help:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 6051927041

The tin-foil hat nuts didn't say anything about Yahoo Answers being among those other liers.

Eh, artificial sweeteners aren't exactly healthy. Aspartame makes me ill, not saying everyone reacts the same way, but personally I had to stop drinking diet sodas. There's also the theory that artificial sweeteners makes you more likely to eat more because it tricks your brain into thinking you need calories. Some say it's healthier to drink regular soda (pop) from a diet perspective. There's some data that high fructose corn syrup is also bad for you, but in all honesty sugar itself isn't exactly healthy either.

As Julia Child would say "Everything in moderation".

One thing is certain however, caffeine is generally not good for you. Don't overdo it. Too much can land you in the hospital.

Take my anecdotal story for what you want.

When I was around 12-13 years old, my parents had just finished divorcing, I was living with my mom. My mom decided to only buy diet Coke for her, and there were no other flavored drinks in the house. So I decided to just start drinking her diet Coke. Of course, my father had told me that diet Coke was the devil, aspartame was bad, but that's another long story. Anyway, I started drinking it regularly, and would probably drink like 5-6 cans a day. I started getting headaches, and my eyes sorta burnt/got really sensitive to light and stuff, and I started feeling nauseous. I thought, it was just the caffeine, but I had first, an Arizona Green Tea with more caffeine, felt fine. Then later, to test my hypothesis some more, I made an entire pot of coffee and drank it while shoveling snow. Felt fine. Then I got some Clear American seltzer with Aspartame and felt the same way as diet Coke.

So yeah, stopped my aspartame, all my headaches stopped immediately, and I've been way healthier ever since. The stuff isn't good for you at all. I'd at least TRY stopping the Aspartame for a short time and see how you feel, you might be surprised.