how exactly is diet coke going to make you fat???
It's no accident that many diet soda drinkers remain overweight. When we drink diet sodas hoping to lose weight, we're taking in artificial sweeteners that can actually make us store more fat and eat more food. Diet Sodas and Fat Storage (the Insulin Factor)
We have four primary taste receptors on our tongue - sweet, sour, bitter and salty. When we drink a diet soda, the artificial sweetener stimulates the tongue's sweet receptors. These receptors immediately signal the brain that carbohydrates in the form of sugar are on the way to the stomach. The body prepares for the arrival of the sugar by releasing insulin into the blood stream.
Insulin not only has the job of unlocking our cells so that sugars can enter, insulin also carries out the less-known function of initiating the storage of fat in our cells.
When sugars actually do enter the blood after our taste sensors have stimulated the release of insulin, the sugar will be moved into the cells that need it and insulin levels will soon return to normal. But if sugar does not enter the bloodstream after insulin is released, insulin levels will remain high in repeated attempts to find sugar and move it into our cells. This causes an extended period of high insulin level which will soon trigger insulin's secondary metabolic function of fat storage. This process promotes the storage of food into fat cells so we can use it as fuel for energy another day - a day which may never come if we do not change our diet and increase our level of exercise.
Over time, this extended period of elevated insulin causes another problem - our body develops a resistance to insulin. Insulin resistance forces the body to produce higher and higher levels of insulin to "open" the cells to receive sugar. Some of the major physical markers of insulin resistance are obesity (particularly in the abdominal area), hypertension, and high cholesterol.
Dangerously, the repetition of this process can promote the onset of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar caused by elevated levels of insulin). Hypoglycemia can later turn into diabetes, a disease that is now becoming widespread in America.
