The recent decision to stop selling all soft drinks in public schools with the exception of diet drinks is flawed. Besides being carcinogenic, there is another major reason why diet drinks are unhealthy, and perhaps more dangerous than the ones with real sugar!

The simple explanation is as follows.

When anything sweet is introduced into the body, one of the first things to take place is that the pancreas reacts by secreting insulin. Insulin is the hormone that is responsible for lowing blood sugar. The insulin finds the sugar and moves it from your blood into your cells. Maybe a little oversimplified, but that’s how it works.

Now, if you drink a diet soda, the artificial sweetness still ‘tricks’ the body into secreting insulin. Your body is actually fooled. So now what we have is free insulin in the blood and no sugar for it to react with. What do you think happens then? With all of the free insulin floating around, your actual blood sugar levels plummet which translates into hunger!

That’s right, diet sodas actually make you hungry for more food. So when you think you are doing your body a service by drinking sodas and drinks with artificial sweeteners, please remember how this whole process works. Diet sodas actually make you gain weight.

I urge the ones responsible for getting the sweetened sodas out of public schools to reconsider and get rid of the nasty diet drinks as well. We’ll all be a lot healthier!