Cutting down on diet soda

It is a healthy trend – sales of diet soda’s have been on the decline. Sold as a zero-calorie beverage, more and more people, as they get health conscious have started realizing the detrimental effects of this diet soda and how it not really zero calorie. There was a time when Coca Cola and the others pumped up production of diet sodas as full calorie sales were huge. At that peak time, according to Beverage Marketing Corp, diet soda's share of consumption rose from 26% to 31% between 1990 and 2010.

And for three straight years now, sales of diet sodas have been on a persistent decline. Store sales of zero- and low-calorie soda plunged 6.8% in dollar terms in the 52 weeks through Nov. 23, while sales of regular sodas dropped 2.2%. Apart from people getting health conscious, many have also come to realize that one could have serious health issues due to the artificial sweeteners found in diet soda, which is aspartame and also due to sucralose and acesulfame potassium. Social network, the same platform, which was used by the very same companies to boost their sales, has now become their bane with more and more people, posting their “giving up” of diet soda and many listing reasons why everyone else should also give up. Facebook and Twitter have become the vehicles for these diet-soda doomsayers’.

This is a good trend and one should hope that people give up full calorie beverages too. Only one glaring misnomer – if people in America are getting health conscious, how come no sales drop of pizzas and burgers? And in India, looking at the people are gobbling up these junk foods, surely we are going to have more obese people here than currently in America.