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Coffee Drinkers Are More Likely To Live Longer. Decaf May Do The Trick, Too (npr.org)
Coffee is far from a vice. There's now lots of evidence pointing to its health benefits, including a possible longevity boost for those of us with a daily coffee habit. From a report: The latest findings come from a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine that included about a half-million people in England, Scotland and Wales. "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers" during the decade-long study, says Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute. Participants ranged in age from 38 to 73. The association held up among drinkers of decaffeinated coffee, too. In the U.S., there are similar findings linking higher consumption of coffee to a lower risk of early death in African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and white adults, both men and women. A daily coffee habit is also linked to a decreased risk of stroke and Type 2 diabetes.
That's how it works.
Unless it replaces diet soda, as in my case.
Diet soda is even more unhealthy than regular soda though- so replacing diet soda is still a net positive in terms of health.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Stimulants can have a calming effect on people with ADHD.
Cheap storage VM.
The type II diabetes is garbage science if there's actually any science actually behind the claim. As someone with hypoglycemia (diabetes is known as hyperglycemia, btw), let me explain.
Too much sugar causes type II diabetes because to process the sugar your body has to excrete large amounts of insulin. If it doesn't do this, the sugar builds up in your blood and you die. The problem comes in that your body becomes resistant to insulin the more you have in your blood. Thus you need more and more insulin to get the same effect. At some point your body just can't create enough insulin to absorb the sugar because you've become so tolerant to insulin. At this point you need artificial sources and welcome to type II diabetes.
If what you said were true, drinking a diet coke would increase your insulin levels, but there would be no sugar for it to attach to (the sweetener used in diet coke is actually one of the amino acids used to make up muscle tissue, not similar to sugar at all). If your body did this, which is what would be needed to cause type II diabetes, your blood sugar would crash to dangerously low levels. This is what's known as hypoglycemia. And what happens when your blood sugar crashes? You fall in to a coma, and potentially die. I have lost consciousness more times than I care to admit because of this. Fortunately I'd eaten shortly before which allowed my blood sugar to recover. So if diet coke had a habit of causing people to pass out and die, I'd believe it'd have the ability to cause type II diabetes, but without that, I call bullshit.
Different chemicals may cause different issues, but all sweet drinks cause the same hunger response. Sweet on your tongue makes you eat more -- seems to be true for all primates. We know this from monkeys studies.
So diet drinks increase your caloric intake -- it's not the drink itself which does it, but the calorie intake goes up just the same. Drink diet soda, and get fat. Maybe not as fat as on sugar drinks, but certainly more fat than on water.