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Diet drinks

M

Modeller

Member
Messages
5
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Hi. I was at my Diabetic review this morning. The Nurse told me that diet fizzy drinks do have sugar in them. I checked the ingredients label of Pepsi Max, Diet Coke and a shops own brand, and nowhere does it say sugar. Is it hidden in another ingredient? If so then it shouldn't be labelled as no suger surely?

Any advise would be very welcome.
 
Hi @Modeller and welcome to the forum. I drink diet drinks all the time and they have no effect on my blood sugar. There is NO sugar in them however individuals may react to certain sweeteners as if it was sugar, I have no idea why! In my case saccharin does though.
 
She definitely said there was sugar in them.
 
Perhaps she classes the artificial sweeteners as sugar, which can increase blood sugar, significantly in my case.
 
Hi
I drink diet pepsi and it has no effect on my levels.
Some drinks say low sugar or reduced sugar and i have a feeling one of the fantas falls into that category.
Fizzy drinks are not good for us whether they have sugar or not so perhaps this is where she was coming from?

Tony
 
Some people on this forum have reported that some artificial sweetners raise their blood glucose - that certainly doesn't happen to me. I regularly drink Coke Zero, low carb beers, and Lidl's zero sugar lemonades and caffeine drinks - no BG impact whatsoever.

Food and drink manufacturers are obliged by law to include an accurate list of contents. The advertising blurb is a different matter - some drinks will say things like "no added sugar" or "only natural sugars" - which means there might still be a lot of naturally occurring sugar - from fruit, for example. "Reduced" or "lower" sugar - from what, to what? Still could be high, just not as high as the other product.

But anything claiming "no sugar" or "zero sugar" - you'd be entitled to take the normally understood meaning from those words, and I would have thought that manufacturers would not want to be paying compensation for misleading customers.
 
Modeller said:
Artificial sweetener can increase blood sugar???!!! How???
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This is an hypothesis - I don't have any evidence for it. It's possible that an artificial sweetener might stimulate your liver to release glucose into your system - by promoting cortisol production, possibly. So the chemical of itself doesn't primarily affect BG, but its impact elsewhere in the system might have that second-order effect for some people.
 
For some people some artificial sweeteners can trigger a response similar to sugar, the sweetness tricks your brain into thinking sugar is on its way & responds the same way.

I drink diet Pepsi & diet Irn Bru & they don’t affect me, but I only have them with a meal. I also have a very occasional Shwepps diet tonic with a gin

But some sugar free sweets & the low carb sweet bars like carb killa bars & the skinny & Co range all affect my BG & I personally avoid them (plus they have a lot of not that great ingredients in anyway

Sucralose Affects Glycemic and Hormonal Responses to an Oral Glucose Load - PMC

Nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), such as sucralose, have been reported to have metabolic effects in animal models. However, the relevance of these findings to human subjects is not clear. We evaluated the acute effects of sucralose ingestion on the ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
The nurse was wrong, she doesn't really understand T2. Diet drinks don't have sugar and don't normally raise BG levels.

However they can cause insulin resistance and therefore metabolic syndrome...which is what T2 really is.
Links to follow. I'm babysitting at the moment...

I'm back!

Diet soda and diabetes: Research and considerations

Sweeteners in diet soda may have links with metabolic syndrome and weight gain. Learn about how this can affect diabetes here.
www.medicalnewstoday.com

Is diet soda bad for you? | HealthFocus SA | University Health

Dr. Vidhya Illuri, endocrinologist at University Health, talks about how drinking a lot of diet soda can lead to insulin resistance which can lead to Type 2 diabetes.
www.universityhealth.com

This happened to me. I started off drinking a moderate amount of diet drinks but found them to be very addictive and eventually was consuming alot of them daily. I thought they would keep me slim. It took me years to manage to stop drinking them. But I did and now can have 1 or 2 when away on holiday. I would never have them at home though. I'm still battling the weight gain they caused. Please don't tell me it was the food I ate that caused the weight gain. For the most part I was counting calories. I know what happened to me. Most people don't have this problem, but I did.
 
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Interesting.

"[Results of]...our study demonstrate that sucralose affects the glycemic and hormonal responses to an oral glucose load in obese people who do not normally consume NNS."

So they seem to be saying not that the sweetener increased BG by itself, but that it (slightly) inhibited the body's response to glucose consumed at the same time. I've never bought the "sweeteners fool your body into thinking it's sugar" explanation because if that was the case, your fooled body would be producing extra insulin to deal with the (fake) sugar, and you'd therefore expect blood glucose to fall rather than rise. It would possibly help to explain increased insulin resistance, but not raised BG.

You could therefore potentially have a situation where having a sweetener-flavoured drink on its own would have no impact, but having the same drink while eating carbs might see a higher than expected BG figure.
 
As you know @KennyA I don’t do science I just do lovinglife experience & all I know is when I eat certain sweeteners usually that are mixed with ingredients I can’t even pronounce it affects my BG
 
lovinglife said:
As you know @KennyA I don’t do science I just do lovinglife experience & all I know is when I eat certain sweeteners usually that are mixed with ingredients I can’t even pronounce it affects my BG
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Ultimately it all comes down to what works and doesn't work for you. If everyone says X does Y, but for you X does Z, and you don't want Z, that's how it is.

I often get the feeling that maybe in 40 or 50 years someone will be looking back at how we understood T2 in 2026, and be laughing.
 
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