This is so close to me. My husband used to drink a lot of it. Now, he only does it occasionally, much to my chagrin! Not only make it increase stroke risk by 50% it may also make you fat! Thanks for the info, Dr. Mercola. Read on…….

“Diet soda is often perceived as being “healthier” than regular soft drinks because it contains artificial sweeteners in lieu of sugar, and therefore has no calories.

Many conventional nutritionists will even go so far as to recommend diet soda as a sensible beverage choice.

Sugar, and particularly the sugar often used to sweeten regular soda, is clearly something you need to limit for optimal health… but, while I do not recommend you drink any soda, if given the choice, between regular soda and diet, the regular soda would likely be less damaging to your health

In fact, before you reach for another can, you might want to get up to speed on the latest research, which shows that drinking diet soda results in an increased risk of vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.ⁱ

Is Drinking Diet Soda Worth Increasing Your Stroke Risk?

Diet soda can be addictive, so if you need incentive and motivation to quit this habit, ask yourself whether the pleasure you get from drinking it is worth having a stroke.

This is a very real scenario, as researchers found that people who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent more likely to have suffered a vascular event, including a stroke.

This significant association persisted even after controlling for other factors that could increase the risk, such as smoking, physical activity levels, alcohol consumption, diabetes, heart disease, dietary factors and more.

According to the authors:

“This study suggests that diet soda is not an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages, and may be associated with a greater risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, or vascular death than regular soda.”

Vascular events like strokes and heart attacks typically occur suddenly without any warning, which is why prevention is so important. I like to refer to the most common type of stroke as a brain attack, which is similar to a heart attack; the only difference is that the blood clot blocks blood flow to your brain instead of your heart. As a result, brain cells begin to die. Naturally, the longer your brain goes without oxygen, the greater your risk of lasting brain damage.

This is one area where conventional emergency medicine excels, as there are emergency medications that can actually dissolve a blood clot that is blocking blood flow to your brain, and if done quickly enough can virtually reverse any permanent neurological damage.

In order to be effective, you typically need to get treated within one hour. This is clearly one of the miracles of modern science, however it all goes to waste if you do not address the underlying conditions after the stroke. Again, prevention is your best option, and research is now suggesting that eliminating diet sodas may be an important way to dramatically reduce your stroke risk.

While more research will likely be needed to confirm this potential link, there’s plenty of evidence showing that artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose (Splenda) can be dangerous to your health. I believe aspartame is, by far, the most dangerous artificial sweetener on the market. Reports of adverse reactions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also support this, as aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA.”