Originally Posted by
baron von trail
The stomach is filled with HCL, but I highly doubt that anyone here will be drinking any Hydrochloric acid anytime soon. Not saying that diet soda is HCL, but it sure doesn't have the Ph of water.
From my recent understanding, acidic diets have been associated with all sorts of ailments. The name of the healthier-living game is to reduce acid intake and shift over to a more alkaline diet. Dumping soda would be one step in that direction.
Better cut out that orange and grapefruit juice then. Both have a lower pH than diet coke. And diet coke is less than 1% the pH of what's already in your stomach. pH is not a linear scale, it's logarithmic like the Richter scale for earthquakes. Your stomach's at about a 1, diet coke's at 3, grapefruit juice at 2.8 or so.
I think that a lot of the acidity in the liquid is from carbonic and phosphoric acid. The carbonic acid is not stable at room temperature, it dissociates into CO2 + H2O as it warms up. Flat soda tastes flat because...it's less acidic. Some of that CO2 gets dissolved in your bloodstream as you digest, but the body is really good at getting rid of CO2. So the acidity of most soda products is probably overstated somewhat, by the time it gets warm enough to be dangerous, it's less acidic.
A better argument against soda is that it screws up the Calcium/Phosphorus balance in your mouth, causing dental issues.
Everything in moderation. I stick to no more than 2 cans a day 90% of the time, and sometimes don't even hit that level. More out of monetary considerations rather than health ones. If you drank cases of soda every week, yeah, that's probably not so good, either for your health or wallet. All that stuff's gotta get filtered out or metabolized somewhere, and overloading those mechanisms is probably a bad thing. Using them within their operating limits isn't so bad.