Your daily diet soda fix could be doing more harm than good
Hardly the first study to scrutinize the health issues related to artificial sweeteners, a recent study has found that consuming high amounts of low- and no-calorie sweeteners is associated with an accelerated rate of cognitive decline. That led the researchers behind an updated study, published last month in the journal Neurology, concluded that there could be long-term harm from regular consumption of these sweeteners
Based on a roughly eight-year study, the team tracked the cognitive decline of nearly 13,000 adults in Brazil based on how much low- and no-calorie sweeteners they consumed. They found that there was a gap of about 1.6 years of brain aging between those people who consumed the most and least sweeteners.
“Consumption of aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame k, erythritol, sorbitol, and xylitol was associated with a faster decline in global cognition, particularly in memory and verbal fluency domains,” wrote the researchers, led by a team from the University of São Paulo. They found that the highest consumption of these sweeteners was associated with faster decline among participants without diabetes along with faster decline in memory decline among those participants with diabetes
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HOW MUCH YOU DRINK MATTERS
Study participants consumed an average of about 92 milligrams of artificial sweeteners per day, though some participants consumed nearly twice that amount. For context, a 12-ounce can of many popular diet sodas contains up to 200 milligrams of sweeteners like aspartame
Such sweeteners have previously been linked to adverse health outcomes that include an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and a higher risk of cardiovascular events. But the newfound link to cognitive decline might give some people cause or pause
However, one of the study’s authors cautions that because it was an observational study, the researchers can’t prove that sweeteners alone caused the cognitive decline. And the results don’t suggest that drinking an occasional diet soda is harmful, as Claudia Kimie Suemoto of the University of São Paulo told Inc.
