Diet Poison

If you didn't already know that anything presented by American food companies was nothing more than a tarted-up lie smothered in rich, velvety caramel, yet another group of researchers has linked diet soda consumption to very bad things.
   Even better, the work was done right here in San Antonio, currently the 3rd fattest city in the nation.* Seems that in a decades-long study, people who consumed lots o' diet soder had, on average, 70 percent more belly fat than those who didn't consume said soder.
   Christ on a crutch! SEVENTY percent?! If the guys who did the study weren't wearing white coats I almost wouldn't believe it. That's enough fat to float a boat, which is a truly disgusting image if you think about it long enough.
   Of course, correlation does not equal causation. It could be that people who gained a lot of weight consumed more diet soda because they were trying to slim down, rather than gaining weight because of their aspartame intake. You need more to make the link between consuming aspartame and becoming a big fat sucker.
   And there is more - in a related study, mice given a diet spiked with aspartame had elevated glucose levels but decreased insulin levels. In other words, they were becoming diabetic. Take this study with the increased belly fat study and it's hard to argue that artificial sweetener has any benefits at all.
   So the verdict is essentially in with this one. Diet soda is poison. More specifically aspartame is poison. There ain't nothing good about it.
   Which means I have no excuse now to keep drinking soda. Oh yeah, I'm off the wagon again, if I hadn't mentioned that. I need to stop drinking soda. For real. I wouldn't keep drinking rat poison if someone pointed out to me that strychnine was causing my convulsions, and I don't need any more diet soda now that someone has pointed out to me my spare tire is exacerbated by aspartame.
   It's hard. Just look at the number of times I've stopped and started right back up again. The stuff is like cigarettes you don't have to light. But it's poison, and I need to give it up. So I'm gonna. Starting tomorrow.



* because we're not trying hard enough to be Number One, evidently