in Food & Booze, So That Happened

After Trump Revelation, Experts Weigh In About What A Dozen Diet Cokes A Day Will Do To You

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Love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit that President Donald Trump is fascinating, but usually in the way that looking at crime scene photos or rubbernecking at a car accident is fascinating. In recent days, we’ve learned some odd details about the gluttonous habits of your favorite president. For example, in addition to all of his presidentin’ duties, he finds a way to squeeze in four to eight hours of TV daily, and he has a preferred McDonald’s order of two Big Macs, two fish sandwiches, and a chocolate shake. But hey, the president of the United States isn’t just going to keel over from a heart attack or complications of type II diabetes anytime soon because he washes food like that down with sugar-free, calorie-free, waist-friendly Diet Coke. In fact, Trump drinks about a dozen Diet Cokes. Every. Day.

Yeah, going for Diet Coke over original recipe Coca-Cola saves Trump 1,680 calories and 468 grams of high fructose corn syrup on a daily basis, but consuming all that brown fizzy water sweetened with lab-created fake sugar just can’t be healthy, right? Not according to many biologists, nutritionists, and other people in the know. For example, A study published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine and another one done by the University of Texas Health Science Center found a correlation between consuming fake sugar and weight gain.

Diet drinks are also bad for your dental health. A University of Michigan study concluded that regular sodas and diet sodas eroded teeth at about the same rate — so it’s more than just sugar to blame.

Diet Coke doesn’t contain one delicious upper — sugar — but it does contain another one: caffeine. Each can packs about 42 mg of the best part of waking up, which for Trump adds up to 504 mg daily. That gives him the energy he needs to watch eight hours of TV or go on a 5 a.m. tweet storm, but it’s way past the safe daily recommended caffeine dose for an adult of 400 mg.

Perhaps the negative health effect of Diet Coke most pertinent to a discussion of the man with the nuclear codes is that regularly drinking diet soda may increase the risk of dementia. A Boston University study of more than 4,300 adults found that sugar-free sodas, not regular ones, were more likely to lead to dementia (and strokes). Those test subjects that drank one or more diet sodas a day were three times more likely to lose brain function. Neat!

https://twitter.com/RickAaron/status/939727423649718274

https://twitter.com/HafizDoc/status/939753894795673600

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https://twitter.com/BrendonHope/status/939687982637953025

And lending some credence to the “Diet Coke rots your brain” theory, here’s Donald Trump himself, disparaging Diet Coke…back in 2012. (That’s roughly 17,500 Diet Cokes ago.)