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Hosted by Paul Evans, Registered Nutritionist (@paulthenutritionist)
Tired of the endless food fads, influencer nonsense, and TikTok nutrition “hacks”? This podcast cuts through it all.
No Forking Nonsense delivers straight-talking, science-backed nutrition advice that actually makes sense — in under 20 minutes. No fluff. No fads. Just real answers from a qualified expert who knows what works in the real world.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense. And today, we are talking about Diet Coke, and this is based on an article that I did with health. I'll link that article in the description below. But before we get into that, are you sick and tired of this algorithm only showing you viral, unhealthy, unhelpful, shitty nutrition and health advice. If you are, goes without saying, interact with this episode, interact with content that is factual, that is positive, and that actually gives you factual information.
@paulthenutritionist:That's all you have to do. I've had so many people who told me that they've done that, and as a result, their algorithms completely changed. In other news, have you ever been stood in a supermarket at lunchtime looking at meal deals, wondering what the heck to buy? Well, I've fixed all that for you. I've created a free resource you can download below, top link in the description below, completely free, where I break down the best combinations of meal deals for you so you never have to wonder again.
@paulthenutritionist:You literally can take that into the supermarket and just copy it. It's straightforward. It covers every supermarket in The UK, plus how to create meal deals without buying a meal deal. Anyway, let's get into today's episode, which is on is Diet Coke really that bad
@paulthenutritionist:for you? So there's a thing going around at the moment called a fridge cigarette,
@paulthenutritionist:and I didn't really know what it was until I
@paulthenutritionist:was asked to do this article. And if
@paulthenutritionist:you haven't come across it, it's a TikTok's name for a cold can of Diet Coke. The idea being that you step outside, you crack one open, you get five minutes to yourself and a little hit of something, and then you go back to work. As a description of why people love it, it's it's pretty spot on. And that's exactly what it is. It's a break with a bit of fizz.
@paulthenutritionist:As a name, though, I think it's a bit daft. I'm gonna tell you why in a minute because it really annoys me. I got asked to contribute to an article about this recently, and it really got me thinking about it because the fridge cigarette thing has kind of kicked off a fresh round of people online telling you that Diet Coke is poison. In fact, in the they did a carousel link in the article. And if you go on to Health's Instagram, people are absolutely being baited into Diet Coke and sweeteners being the enemy.
@paulthenutritionist:So here is my actual position, and some of you might not like it. But if a can of Diet Coke is the worst thing in your diet, you're probably not doing too bad. So I wanna get the first thing off my chest. Calling a can of Diet Coke a fruit cigarette is... I mean, it's a bit of a joke, really, but words kinda matter.
@paulthenutritionist:And some people are now genuinely repeating it like it is kind of a factual thing. Let's obviously draw comparisons here. Cigarettes kill about eight million people a year. Diet Coke is... I mean, it's fizzy water with a bit of sweetener and some caffeine in.
@paulthenutritionist:And those two things are obviously not in the same category. And if you've ever sat with somebody who's dying because of smoking, as I imagine,
@paulthenutritionist:there are people in your lives who have, the comparison probably stops being funny. So we can
@paulthenutritionist:probably park that for what it is. What I actually worry about about Diet Coke isn't the sweetener. A can of Coke has more caffeine in it than a regular can of Coke. And most people have no idea. And we've spoken about caffeine before in sleep episodes, and I urge you to search the sleep episode because it has and it will transform your sleep tonight if you listen to it.
@paulthenutritionist:But most people think that diet means less of everything. When it actually doesn't, the caffeine goes up. Now on its own, that's fine, but nobody kinda drinks that on its own. They usually, you know, have cups of coffee, tea, whatever, and then they have a Diet Coke in the afternoon, after lunch, maybe a couple throughout the day. And that's where it probably starts
@paulthenutritionist:to matter because caffeine hangs around for hours. There was
@paulthenutritionist:a 2013 study, and it's one of my favorites because of what it found. They gave people caffeine six hours before bed. So if you're in bed at eleven, that's a coffee at five in the evening, which is perfectly, I guess, normal thing to do. But it measurably disrupted their sleep. And here's the part that's really important.
@paulthenutritionist:The people themselves didn't notice. They didn't report that their sleep was impacted. But their health data told us otherwise. So you've got a situation there where your sleep is being chipped away and you just don't feel it as poor sleep. You just feel maybe a little bit flat the next day.
@paulthenutritionist:And, you know, what do you do when you feel flat? You reach for more caffeine. And round and round it goes. It's one of those cycles. And that's the actual issue with Diet Coke, not the aspartame and the...
@paulthenutritionist:Or the sweeteners. It's the fact that the caffeine delivery system is probably having more of an impact on you than you'd realize. And the second thing, and nobody says this one, is
@paulthenutritionist:your teeth. So there is no sugar in Diet Coke. That's correct. And people just assume, well, then that's not gonna impact my teeth badly. And, obviously, sugar is gonna have a much more obvious impact on your teeth.
@paulthenutritionist:But the problem isn't sugar. It's the acid when it comes to diet drinks. It's genuinely an acidic acidic drink, and the acid is what wears enamel. And the practical bit that actually can change something is how you drink it. And it's not how much you drink.
@paulthenutritionist:It's how long you drink it. So if
@paulthenutritionist:you sit at your desk and you sip the same can for over an hour, you are literally bathing your teeth in acid for over an hour. Whereas if you drink it in, I don't know, five, ten minutes, your mouth deals with it and it moves on. So the person who is sensibly sipping their drink slowly is doing more damage to the person
@paulthenutritionist:who necks it. Now I'm not saying neck your diet drink, but don't nurse it. Or... And even better, have a glass of water with it so you can swell the the acid out of your mouth or have it with food. Right?
@paulthenutritionist:Really, really important. And never ever ever brush your teeth straight after. I mean,
@paulthenutritionist:why would you do that anyway? But straight after a diet drink, give it half an hour because the enamel softened and you'll just scrub it. So if you do those things, we're gonna reduce the impact, not completely eliminate, but reduce the impact on our teeth. Now let's talk about aspartame. Every eighteen months, someone shares a headline about it and everyone goes mental.
@paulthenutritionist:The big one was in 2023 when aspartame was classified as possibly carcinogenic. Terrifying headline, but this is what actually happened. That classification is a statement about how strong the evidence is, not about how dangerous the thing is. So it's like a filing system for certainty.
@paulthenutritionist:Right? In that same framework, you'll find things like aloe vera, pickled vegetables, and nobody has run a campaign around pickles and aloe vera. And at the same time, the body that actually sets safe intake levels looked at it and didn't change the number. The acceptable daily intake works out roughly around two thousand eight hundred milligrams for a seventy kilo adult. So let's do some maths here.
@paulthenutritionist:In cans of Diet Coke, that is well over 12 Diet Cokes a day every day for the rest of your life. And that's where the danger of aspartame comes in in terms of being possibly carcinogenic. Now my friends, if you are drinking that, we need
@paulthenutritionist:to have a very separate conversation, and it certainly isn't about aspartame. There's another study from 2006 that followed around half a million people and found no association between aspartame and the cancers that
@paulthenutritionist:they were looking at. And that one doesn't get headlines because large study finds nothing is not something anyone's writing an article about.
@paulthenutritionist:So the bit that's gonna annoy people is that in 2003, the World Health Organization put out guidance advising against using sweeteners for weight control. Now that got reported as the World Health Organization saying sweeteners don't work and might harm you. But what it actually was was guidance based on low certainty evidence and that they themselves flagged as low certainty. And I described it in the article as a shrug with a press release, and I stand by that statement. And here is the problem.
@paulthenutritionist:And this is why in the article, lots of little people getting on their little high horse with nutritional therapists in their Instagram bio when we all know nutritional therapists are essentially the astrology of the nutrition and health world. The problem with observational studies, and this is why we have to look at it from a science perspective, is that observational studies are literally observational. So it's the equivalent. Let me put it in real terms for you. It's the equivalent of saying there is a correlation to people who...
@paulthenutritionist:No. There is a correlation to ice cream sales and drowning. There is an increase in drowning when ice cream sales go up. Now an observational studies would say that ice cream causes drownings when actually it's a correlation. So it doesn't cause that effect.
@paulthenutritionist:But the problem with these observational studies is that what happens in this regard was that they found people who drank diet drinks had more health problems. So then the headline writes itself, diet drinks cause health problems, except when you think about who switches to diet drinks. Often, people who've been told to lose weight, people whose doctors have had a word, people who are managing their blood sugars. The risk caused the diet drink, not the other way around. And when researchers adjust for things like body weight, the link gets a lot weaker.
@paulthenutritionist:And there's a BMJ, British Medical Journey Analysis, that shows exactly that with type two diabetes. When you do the proper trials where you actually randomize people, the picture looks different again. There's a trial in New England Journal from 2012 with over 600 children where swapping one sugary drink a day for a sweetened one meant less weight gain over eighteen months. And a review of a 129 comparisons found that swapping sugar for low calorie sweeteners reduced how many calories people took in. So the honest summary is this.
@paulthenutritionist:The evidence that it harms you is weak and mostly the wrong kind of study. The evidence that it helps people cut sugar is better. So where it genuinely helps. Now I've had plenty of clients who drank a lot of full fat Coke. A can of regular Coke is around 35 grams of sugar, and we should be having as adults 30 grams of sugars a day.
@paulthenutritionist:So you're having more than a day's worth of sugar in one can. If you drink one every day for a year, that's getting on for, what, 13 kilos of sugar. If someone's doing that and we swap it for Diet Coke, that is a genuine win. It's not the finish line, but it's a real move in the right direction. And I'm not gonna stand there telling them they've just swapped one poison for another because they haven't, and no science tells us that they have.
@paulthenutritionist:The people who insist otherwise are usually the ones with something to sell you instead. Usually, something that costs £4 and comes out of a glass bottle. The thing that nobody is actually asking about, and it's what I see constantly, and it's never the question I get asked, is people are not drinking enough water. Not a bit short. They're properly not drinking any.
@paulthenutritionist:I'll look at someone's intake, and there's three coffees, two diet coats, a squash, cup of tea, and that's it for the day. And then they're wondering why they're tired, why they've got a headache at 03:00, why they're starving by seven. If you want a target from this episode, forget about the can. The can is fine. Have some actual water.
@paulthenutritionist:And if your gut's playing up... So last one on this because, you know, this comes up a lot. If you've got bloating or gut symptoms and you've decided it's a Diet Coke, probably look elsewhere first. The evidence on sweeteners in the gut in humans is so much thinner than the headlines suggest, and the studies that do something find huge variation between individuals. And before you blame a can of Coke, look at your fiber.
@paulthenutritionist:Look at your alcohol. Look at your nutrient variety. Look at your stress. Look at your sleep. Look at how much fast food you're having.
@paulthenutritionist:In my experiences, it's one of those about nine times out of 10. So here's what I want you to take from this. Five things. Number one, a can of Coke or fizzy drink a day is
@paulthenutritionist:not the problem. If it's the worst thing in your diet, I'm happy you're in good shape. Number two, the caffeine in a can of Coke is probably the worst thing about it, and you need to count it with your coffees and watch anything after about two in the afternoon. Number three, drink it. Don't nurse it for an hour for half a day.
@paulthenutritionist:Ten minutes rather than an hour is much better, and swell it
@paulthenutritionist:with some water or have it post meal so we're not just drowning our teeth in acid. Number four, the scary sweetener headlines are mostly a statement about how certain we are, not about how dangerous it is. And the studies showing harm usually have the cause and the effect the wrong way around. Number five, if you're drinking full sugar Coke daily, swapping it for a non sugar Coke is a real good win. Finally, drink some water.
@paulthenutritionist:So I hope you found this super helpful. Remember the article I contribute towards, it goes into more detail, is the second link under the description, and the top link in the description is a meal deal hacks list whereby in some of those medials, I actually recommend getting a diet sugar free drink. You are welcome. Catch you Friday.