I drink lot of Coca-Cola, specifically Diet Coke. I know what phosphoric acid does to my teeth. I know that caffeine is an addictive stimulant. I can’t find anything bad about aspartame. But I have a generally intelligent friend who tells me that caffeine and aspartame are both known to be carcinogenic, and even that the FDA knows this but invokes “plausible deniability”. She also says that she knows someone who got “caffeine stones” or possibly “Coke stones”. While I welcome any information on any dangers of Coke that I’m unaware of, I want to know specifically about these, since I can find no information on them. I don’t need to know about whether it’s okay in moderation; I consume this stuff in excess. Like 6 mg of caffeine and 24 mg of aspartame per kilo of body mass per day. Am I in danger of getting caffeine stones?
Well, caffiene has been shown to be anti-carcinogentic (a word?) but I can’t provide a cite…just something I saw on the 6:00 news one night.
Aspartame does break down into methanol in the digestive system. Methanol or wood alcohol causes blindess in large doses. How bad is it? Tought to say. There’s tons of mis(dis)information relating to it .
Caffeine at 6mg/kg/day? Few people would consider that a lot.
If you were a slightly-larger-than-average 100kg, that would equal 600mg caffeine/day. That’s about 3 or 4 cups of coffee. That also equals 20 cans of Diet Coke.
I can’t really comment on 2400mg/day of aspartame. Although you’ll find plenty of wild claims on the internet touting it’s dangers, the credibility of those claims is quite low in my opinion; if for no other reason than the fact that “victims” are not regularly receiving jury awards for the damage it supposedly does. I’d be content with the fact that 2400mg aspartame is taking the place 480 grams of real sugar. That’s 1900 calories you’re dodging right there.
I’d be a bit more concerned about the phosphoric acid. I don’t know the Normality (a measure of acid strength) of the Diet Coke solution, but I do know that its pH is around 4, as compared to regular coke which is much closer to a pH of 3. It takes a lot of acid to keep the sugar soluble in the regular Coke. In Diet Coke, I assume the phosphoric acid is mostly present for flavor and texture.
Which all leaves me with a big “So What?” The usual pH found in the stomach is between 0 and 1, so if anything, Diet Coke makes the stomach less acidic. But since pH 1 is 1000x more acidic than pH 4, the stomach would hardly notice the difference.
So…just to get this straight, three or four cups of coffee has as much caffeine as 20 cans of coke?!?
So, is it us 3-cup a day people who should be worried about caffeine stones? :eek:
Yeah that sounds about right. 
But I only weigh 93 kg.
Pretty good information so far, thanks. It’s pretty much what I thought, but again, I am wondering specifically about caffeine stones. I don’t even know what they are. Are they just kidney stones due to caffeine?
Yup. You won’t find it on the can, but I’ve found other sources which state Diet Coke has ~30mg caffeine / 12 fl. oz. I’ll let someone else find a cite. And from the Merck Index, you’ll find that a “standard”, brewed, 5 oz. cup of coffee has (IIRC) 150mg caffeine. Merck also gave a different concentration for percolated coffee, which was closer to 200mg/5oz.
The Merck Index I read this in was the 1983 version and it wouldn’t surprise me if the data came from the 50’s or 60’s. It didn’t have any values listed for espresso.
See also http://www.coffeefaq.com/caffaq.html#HowMuchCaff (although this doesn’t seem to list Diet Coke…)
Just so I can mention Richard Simmons, I saw Richard Simmons in an interview a couple of years ago (I think on ‘Regis & Kathy Lee’). He mentioned that he cut diet cola out of his diet and replaced it with water, and lost a few pounds over the year. His point was that although it’s diet, I guess diet cola can mess around with your system with the sodium & other ingredients present…
Yes, diet coke will definitely kill you, assuming of course that you live long enough.
With all due respect to Mr. Simmons, losing a few pounds over a year could be due to a multitude of factors not at all related to Diet Coke. Some people like me who have water retention issues can fluctuate quite widely in weight. I weigh myself every day, and note it down - last week, for example, I had a high of 126 lbm, a low of 118 lbm, and a mean of about 120 lbm.
There are web sites devoted to the dangers of nutrasweet. I suggest alternating with pepsi 1 or diet rite cola which use different sweetners.
k2dave: Two questions. First, do any of those web sites give any information at all on caffeine stones? This sort of thing sounds right up their alley. Second, are any of them as authoritative or well-researched as the web sites that say aspartame is harmless, like www.fda.gov?
There is no such thing as a “caffeine stone.” The likely source of this confusion is the health-food people’s contention that high urinary calcium can cause kidney stones; caffeine may raise calcium excretion, therefore, coffee causes kidney stones. Uh huh. The coffee science people, for their part, claim that caffeine’s diuretic effect actually prevent kidney stones, and that caffeine can also prevent gallstones. I’m inclined to think they’re both full of it.
Achernar
No and No
or more correctly
I havn’t checked lately and this is the 1st time I’ve heard of caffine stones and
and
Most of the anti-nutrasweet usually involve people with common symptoms that they blame on nutrasweet, some site studies which sort of point to that conclusion but as in most studies nothing conclusive can be proven (It is still not a absolute fact that we know that cigerettets cause cancer for the same reason, we could bew 99.999999999999999999999999999% sure but never 100%)