Why diet soft drinks make us fat

There is a misconception that drinking diet soft drinks will stop you putting on weight or even worse - that they should be part of a weight-loss diet.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
What??? I hear you say. - But diet drinks contain little or no calories - how can you possibly put on weight by consuming them?
Easy - and here's how it works.
Diet drinks contain artificial sweeteners which are about ten times sweeter than real sugar but contain no actual sucrose or fructose like real sugar.
The artificial sweeteners trick your brain into thinking it's getting a sugar hit. As sugar is a highly addictive substance, your brain goes a bit silly when it thinks it is about to get a sugar "high". It's actually a conditioned reflex that develops from a life-time of eating sweet foods - just like a junkie reacts to drugs.
The brain alerts the liver that food is on it's way and the liver releases the appropriate hormones.
When the sugar high doesn't eventuate, your liver release hormones that stimulate appetite and your brain starts screaming for sugar or any available carbohydrate to satisfy the craving - just like a junkie that will do almost anything to score their drug of choice.
Even if you have gone cold turkey on sugar, just one diet soft drink will cause a relapse that most sugar addicts can't resist.
So they eat something - anything - that satisfies their craving.
It might be a packet of chips, a burger or a bowl of ice-cream. The point is, it usually contains loads of simple carbohydrates and plenty of useless calories that just go straight to your stomach or hips - where you least want it!
Then of course, you have another diet soft drink to make up for all that useless food and the whole cycle starts again.
There are plenty of studies that show that people who consume diet soft drinks regularly, actually put on more weight than those who drink the full sugar versions.
There is a small percentage of people with very strong willpower who can resist that sugar pull and can consume the occasional diet soft drink without any adverse effects but they probably don't have any problems managing their weight anyway.
The other factor of course is that your body doesn't need anything contained in soft drinks. You would be far healthier if you drank water and left all soft drinks alone.
Many soft drinks also contain caffeine which is another addictive drug that also acts as a diuretic in the body - so drinking any soft drinks with caffeine in them will make you dehydrated. Children seem to be particularly sensitive to caffeine - maybe because their brains are still developing.
As I've mentioned many times before, dehydration is the cause of many of the ills of modern times and the increasing ill-health in our children can often be directly linked to the amount of soft drink they consume instead of pure, natural water.
Our children are developing type 2 diabetes and obesity at an alarming rate and my opinion is that soft drinks - both diet and full sugar versions are the leading cause.
So do yourself and your kids a favour and treat soft drinks as a (very) occasional treat and not an every day drink - only water should fill that role in your health.