Yesterday a work colleague told me of a theory she had seen discussed on the idiot box, namely that when you drink diet soda, it’s seeming sweetness causes your body to gear up for a sugar rush, and consequently when it doesn’t get this sugar this can be harmful.
She stated that drinking a lot of diet beverages, especially when not eating at the same time, could cause you to become diabetic. As I drink a fair few cans of diet coke every day, this assertion was of some interest to me.
The fact that children (or others) with diabetes are advised to drink diet soda is irrelevant to the question since it cannot produce an insulin rush in them. However to me it sounds like the typical BS you get on talk shows. Ok, I am just speculating here, but which do you think is likelier: the body reacts to the presence of sugar in the blood or there is some specific reaction whereby the pituitary (or some other gland) releases a signal that tells the pancreas to crank up the insulin machine? I believe the pancreas senses the level of sugar in the blood and releases insulin to match. The reason diabetes can be so difficult to control properly is that there is no such automatic feedback mechanism. The reason refined sugar and simple starches cause an insulin rush is that so much sugar gets into the blood so quickly. A complex carbohydrate takes a while to digest and releases its sugar slowly, so there is no spike in the blood sugar.
