If you're trying to lose weight, the best thing to do is stay away from diet drinks.
According to American Journal of Public Health, individuals should disregard weight lose programs that suggest replacing regular drinks with diet drinks, based on a new study that claims heavier individuals who consume diet beverages eat more food than those who drink regular sugar-sweetened beverages.
"Diet-soda drinkers who are overweight or obese are eating more solid food during the day than overweight and obese people who drink sugary beverages," said study researcher Sara Bleich, an associate professor at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management.
Bleich said researchers gathered information from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 24,000 people from a 10 year period. Individuals who chose diet drinks got more of those calories from the food that they eat.
Overweight individuals who drink regular sugar-sweetened beverages consume 1,897 calories and those that consume diet beverages, such as sodas, sports drinks and teas, take in a total of 2,058 calories a day.
According to the American Journal of Public Health, overweight individuals who drink diet beverages take in 1,965 in food calories a day compared to 1,874 calories of those who drank regular sugar-sweetened beverages.
"The push to diet soda may not make a lot of sense if you are then also eating more solid food," Bleich said. "The switch from a sugary beverage to a diet beverage should be coupled with other changes in the diet, particularly reducing snacks."
Kelly Brownell, a professor of psychology at the Duke University and Sanford School of Public Policy dean, still many questions left unanswered as to how artificial sweeteners affect a person's diet.
"People need to separate the biology from the psychology," he said.
The American Beverage Association issued a statement Thursday stating that "People need to separate the biology from the psychology."
