Diet drinks can only add to bottom line

10/22/2006

I'll admit it: I've been a bit roly-poly ever since grade school.

I've tried a number of diets through the years, but it seems I was just born more horizontal than vertical.

Still, I never resorted to diet soft drinks as a weight-loss device.

I grew suspicious of diet drinks after spilling one at a school picnic. Normally ants swarm over food or drink on the ground, especially something sweet. But they ran away from the diet soda.

That got me thinking. If ants will not drink it, the beverage probably isn't much good for me either.

So I'm content guzzling the regular soft drinks with sugar, while others reach for the diet version.

And it is hard not to notice that diet drinks appear to have had little positive impact.

Americans are swilling more and more diet drinks each year and growing tubbier all the time.

A study conducted at the University of Texas last year found what I have long suspected: People who drink diet soft drinks don't lose weight.

Instead, they pile it on.

In a Webmd.com story, one of the researchers, Sharon Fowler, said studies suggest diet drinks may actually stimulate appetite.

She said most soft-drink-related obesity risk comes from diet sodas.

"There was a 41 percent increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day," she was quoted as saying.

That hasn't stopped soft-drink companies from introducing a new wrinkle in their campaign to get folks to drink up in order to lose weight.

Rather than the old zero-calorie drinks, they are trotting out a new generation of negative-calorie drinks, which claim to actually burn calories.

They work a little like celery.

Celery contains about six calories per eight-inch stalk, yet people burn more calories just chewing it.

But since it takes 3,500 calories to work off a pound of fat, you would have to chew about a zillion pounds of celery to see much difference.

A Florida company, Elite FX, was the first on the market with a negative-calorie drink, Celsius, last year.

A 12-ounce bottle has zero calories and increases the body's metabolism by more than 12 percent during a three-hour period. The elevated metabolism burns off calories.

A green-tea-based beverage, it contains no fructose corn syrup, no chemical preservatives or carbohydrates.