Asklemmy

I was raised drinking soda as the default... water was never something we'd willingly drink. In middle school I noticed that every day I'd get home from school with a splitting headache and I'd take a couple of aspirin and wash it down with a Coke and the headache would go away. My parents realized that it was likely caffeine withdrawal... so instead of cutting out soda, they started getting me caffeine free soda.

It wasn't until my older brother was in his late 30s and experienced kidney failure and required a transplant that I realized I needed to make a change. I switched over to water and unsweet tea as my defaults. Even after his transplant my brother still would only drink soda... he didn't survive Covid. And today my mom routinely has kidney issues but still refuses to drink water.

Everyone in my family, except for me, has diabetes and kidney issues. I'm sure my 30+ years of daily soda drinking will catch up to me, but I do credit cutting soda out of my diet as having a major positive impact on my overall health.

You can abuse your body a hell of a lot up to that age without too many issues. Those issues will start hitting home within the next decade or so though. Make a change for the better while you can.

Seems like a recipe for kidney stones and a crippling caffeine dependency.

Drink some water, dawg. Please.

Its not good. Caffeinated sodas are a diathetic and it will pull water out of your system. Check out ChubbyEmu's Channel on YouTube for the explanation. If you have been drinking exclusively sodas since a child with no water in take you could be damaging your liver and kidneys. Also I would strongly suggest taking a muti-vitimin daily. Most diet sodas make it harder for you to absorb certain nutrients like folic acid and IIRC B-12.

If you were one of the people that Aspartame is an issue you would know it by know because almost every time you drank soda you would have a headache. You are probably getting more of them just from the dehydration.

Then there are the dental issues. I don't care how old you are, start using sensodyne and look at having your teeth sealed. Your dentist can do wonders that were not possible 15 years ago, but that will give you issues.

Now a while back there was a thing about sodas and diet sodas raising your risk of Cancer but you would have to drink 6L+ a day. Lower amounts are believed to actually fight against cancer cells in their early stages.

Water is amazing. It comes out of taps. It's practically free.

I did that. My teeth are ruined, my breath is nearly always bad. I've had more root canals than is responsible, and it's been massively expensive.

Drink water and brush your teeth.

Even sugar-free drinks are suspected to increase your chance of diabetes, obesity, and a wide variety of other health issues. High consumption of artifically sweetened beverages are suspected to increase your likelihood of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer, notably a large increase in cholecystectomies, which you say you've had.

Here's a long review of smaller-scale studies of a variety of associations and/or suspected causations of diet soda consumption - Notably arterial disease and "remodelling", Weight gain, Depression in later life, Eating disorders, impaired cognitive development, hip fractures, UTIs, Diabetic retinopathy, End-stage renal disease, Leukemia and lymphoma, and overall mortality. The review concluded that by objective standards, the included studies were all at least of "moderate" quality.

Need I go on?

Is a lot of that going to be correlative? For sure yeah. Is it still maybe a very good idea to incorporate more water into your diet? Also yeah.

Diet Soda is essentially just flavored seltzer water with more flavor than the drinks actually labelled as flavored seltzer.

A lot of people in this thread don't seem to understand that.

Most of the people touring horrible health risks have conflated diet sodas with sugary sodas, some have misunderstood some genuine studies on diet soda. The reason diet sodas correlate strongly with certain health conditions is primarily selection bias. Many diet soda drinkers also eat high-fat, high-sodium, US-style fast food diet, which is actually pretty hard in your body. Also Diet Soda's sweet taste can trigger heightened insulin production, because your body expects it to be full of sugar, and that heightened insulin can cause sugar cravings, and some people then consume more sugar satisfying that craving that would have been in a regular soda anyway.

Diet Soda is not a diuretic, it hydrates you just as well as tea, seltzer, or even a slightly smaller glass of plain ol water. There's some unanswered questions about the artificial sweeteners and their long term effects, but any of the really bad stuff they've found in actual studies has been at far higher concentration that a person would consume even if Diet Soda was their only fluid intake.

probably gonna affect your teeth more than anything... but I'm no doctor

I reckon 3.5/10 bad.

Phosphoric acid is the bad one. It can affect kidneys.

Not the answer to your question but: Have you tried water? It's really not that bad. Some even like it.

As for your question: Mayo clinic says "It's not known if drinking diet soda every day is harmful. The evidence on diet soda's health effects isn't clear". So no one knows, but I thank you for your contribution to this experiment. Hope it works out well.

Everybody is different, could be fine could be developing issues that won't by symptomatic until later. Best way to find out is to ask a doctor who can take a family history, run tests to see if you're within normal ranges, ask medically relevant questions, etc.

Bad. Best regards from your older age.

Might be in the risk zone for gout, depending on diet. I'd drink tea.

Kidneys and liver hate this one trick.

I did that for a long time and regretted it.

The excess sugar will make your liver store fat as it can't process it all fast enough. Everything else wrecks your kidneys. Eventually you get to the point where you have to start fixing things, but everything healthy for the liver is bad on the kidneys, and everything good for kidneys is bad for the liver.

For me it was the liver that got me. Luckily I caught it before it became too big a problem. More by coincidence. Fatty liver doesn't have symptoms until it turns into cirrhosis. By then it's too late to do anything. My dad wasn't so lucky and now he is battling dialysis and kidney failure.

It's ok to have sodas once and a while. After losing 90 pounds and getting into regular exercise I refuse to drink sugary drinks. But I really enjoy sugar free options, like coke zero and such. I try to limit myself to one every other day or less. For context, I used to drink at least 40oz of Mt Dew on top of one or two large energy drinks a day. Once I got started, I don't even miss it. But oh the headaches that first week.

How do you do in summers where you need to drink liters of fluids to stay hydrated?

Its bad. Your body still has to process everything in that thats not water and none of it is a positive for the body. Drink water by default and make soda a treat

Ummmm really bad? Also soft drink production wastes insane amounts of water. I might drink one sometimes as a treat, but when I'm home I usually drink tea or water.

How are your teeth? Also, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11501561/

More modern research is starting to explore the biochemistry involved with adverse outcomes. That being the case, people saying bad outcomes are based on lifestyle issues that go hand in hand with using sugar substitutes are behind the curve in the research.

Overall, my opinion is they are generally bad if you consume them multiple times every day, at minimum.

Not a doctor or anything, but I imagine it could be this bad: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwan-hospital-removes-over-300-kidney-stones-from-woman-who-prefers-bubble-tea-to-plain-water

I'd at least try to offset it with water and tea.

There's the thing that people rarely mention when they say this is bad for your health...

There might soon come a day you'll be sitting in the toilet feeling pain and start wondering "should I just use my hands to scoop the shit out of my ass?"

I'm no doctor, but when I started limiting my beer in-take I drank a lot of seltzer water and I think it helped.

I personally preferred to go the snob route and only drink plain seltzer. But other people seem to like the flavored stuff, idk if that would have the same effect.