Recent studies have shown that those who drink diet beverages tend to snack which in turn gain more weight because of the calorie intake than those who drink beverages laced with sugar. These so called Diet beverages which target those who are conscious of weight gain but studies into how these beverages affect weight control have contradictory results.

To gain a better understanding of the relationship between diet beverage consumption and caloric intake, a research team led by Dr. Sara N. Bleich at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined patterns of food and beverage consumption. They used data collected between 1999 and 2010 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a periodic survey of the health and habits of the U.S. population by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The analysis was funded by NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).


The researchers studied almost 24,000 adults, age 20 and older, who reported all the food and beverages they had consumed in a previous 24-hour period. Results appeared online in the American Journal of Public Health on January 16, 2014.


The team found that 11% of healthy-weight, 19% of overweight, and 22% of obese adults drank diet beverages. Diet drinks appeared to help healthy-weight adults maintain their weight. These adults consumed less food and significantly fewer total calories on a typical day than did healthy-weight adults who drank sugared drinks.


Notably, obese adults who consumed diet drinks ate significantly more snacks than those who had sugared drinks. Those who drank diet beverages consumed 131 calories per day in salty snacks and 243 in sweet snacks, compared to 107 and 213, respectively, for obese adults who drank sugared drinks.


“The results of our study suggest that overweight and obese adults looking to lose or maintain their weight—who have already made the switch from sugary to diet beverages—may need to look carefully at other components of their solid-food diet, particularly sweet snacks, to potentially identify areas for modification,” Bleich says.

Source: http://www.nih.gov/