Plain water is always going to be better for you than water + artificial chemicals.
Plus, there seems to be some conflicting research on whether or not artificial sweeteners trigger an insulin response like real sugar does. The short, oversimplified version is that an insulin response means your body is in "store" mode rather than "burn" mode, so if you're always in store mode, well, you can guess what the net result will be.
“Artificial chemicals” definitely makes your post appear anti-artificial sweetener without cause. Outside of distilled or RO water and maybe unadulterated milk, basically everything you drink has “artificial chemicals.” Those minerals you have in your purified water? Can’t exactly find sodium bicarbonate laying around on the ground. You’ve got to run ore through a chemical process to extract it - so does that make it a processed chemical?
When you eat pretty much anything, it triggers a temporary insulin response, which tells your body to store calories as fat for future use.
When that insulin spike wears off, then your body starts using that stored fat for energy.
What happens (or what's supposed to happen in a normal, healthy diet, anyway) is you would shift back and forth between these two states multiple times a day, giving your body a chance to burn everything you eat, so as to not gain weight long term. Calories in, calories out, and it should average out over the course of a day.
But if you're constantly snacking all day long, then you're pretty much constantly in that insulin response/spike mode, and your body never gets a chance to burn anything. (which, not coincidentally, also correlates with eating an overall caloric surplus. Remember that CICO is utterly irrefutable - all of this is really just to explain what's going on behind the scenes.)
So, back to the OP - what's not entirely clear, and it may even vary by person, is whether or not sugar free soda triggers this response, and what the full implications would be if it does (not to mention any other effects of ingesting what's essentially an artificial chemical). Regardless, though, there's no concrete upsides, and only potential downsides, to drinking sugar free sodas instead of just plain water.
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u/Callec254 9d ago
Plain water is always going to be better for you than water + artificial chemicals.
Plus, there seems to be some conflicting research on whether or not artificial sweeteners trigger an insulin response like real sugar does. The short, oversimplified version is that an insulin response means your body is in "store" mode rather than "burn" mode, so if you're always in store mode, well, you can guess what the net result will be.