What's wrong with seltzer?
I wonder what is the pH of glass of carbonated water with a squeeze of lime?
Remember that I mentioned moderation though? A glass or two of OJ, lemonade, tea, coffee, or seltzer a day isn’t going to materially impact your health assuming you’re not diabetic, and practice good oral hygiene. There are also many worse things for your teeth than seltzer, such as potato chips, and poor oral hygiene. If most of what you’re drinking is water, don’t sweat the glass or two of something other than water. Unfortunately too many poeple drink very little unadulterated water, and it does impact their health.
Moderation is the key.
Acidity of most beverages on its own is usually not problematic as saliva (buffered at 6.5 pH) rapidly restores normal pH. It does become an issue if the salivary glands are damaged (as in the case of meth users) or stomach acid comes into contact with teeth.(severe acid reflux or bulimia) However these cannot be considered normal.
The number one cause of dental cavities is always sugar.
('Notable cases' include recorded death.)
That said, the amount of ways your body adapts to osmotic balance problems is in the dozens, so poisoning your body with water, while possible, is hard to the tune of it requires something like drinking 20 liters of water in less than an hour. I mean, it seems to be possible but I cannot imagine succeeding at that even if I'm trying. That's 2 full buckets (and that's just LD50, as in, if you're >70kg it's more than that).
There is an exception: purified water. You cannot drink mineral-poor* or distillated water safely in even small quantities. Why not ? Because that will locally, suddenly and very strongly disrupt the osmotic balance in what you bring it into contact with. It probably not kill you (not without repeated application), but it may cause serious issues in your mouth, throat and stomach. It should also not be used to make coffee or tea and drunk, that merely lessens the effect it doesn't stop it.
* mineral-poor water is something used in chemical and medical laboratories
More acidic than: water milk tea ice tea beer
About that same as: coffee (coffee with milk, however, is essentially not acidic) wine (depends a bit on the kind of wine, sweet wine is less acidic) orange juice (from sweet oranges, the sour ones are usually less acidic)
Less acidic than: lemon juice (coke is a LOT less acidic than lemon juice)* grape juice (esp. when adding lemon juice for more sweetener) lime juice things like "lemon ice tea" (and of course actual tea with lemon in it. It depends on how much lemon. If you add enough lemon to allow for much additional sweetness, it will be a lot more acidic than carbonated beverages)
With fruit things can vary. Apparently the rule is, the sweeter, the more acidic (the opposite of what your tastebuds will tell you, although it's really more a case of if you taste sweetness you ignore sourness. Sweet taste doesn't necessarily mean something is acidic, obviously, but (from a certain level) it does mean you won't notice at all whether something is acidic or not, or how much).
If you're worried about this, even a small sip of milk will eliminate any acidity in your mouth in seconds (milliseconds actually).
* I've heard of medical cases where people managed to dissolve their stomach lining by drinking pure lemon juice (about 1.5 liter), and died due to the stomach juices coming into the abdominal cavity. Yes, that's right, your stomach lining, specifically designed to be able to handle strong acidity, cannot deal with lemon juice.
So no, there is a rebuilding process, but the kind of damage done by acidic substances (including the excretions of bacteria) can sometimes be reversed to some extent. The trend is usually erosion however, and moderate intake of something like seltzer or soda is at least an order of magnitude less than straight water. In addition, while water toxicity is a thing, you’d have to overcome a pretty strong urge to vomit. Short of that, water is doing you no harm, and will never contribute to the erosion of your dental enamel.
A number of toothpaste brands in Japan claims to remineralise teeth with a hydroxyapatite based formula but the results are yet to be confirmed.
Dentists have been using zinc oxide gels and other material to seal exposed dentin but the results are mixed and eventually the filling will fail. Once cavities reach a certain size not much can be done about it.
My kids have no cavities / perfect teeth. My wife and I, by that age range, had tons of cavities.
Some other artificial sweeteners, like saccharin, aren't nearly as sweet per molecule, and you have to add a lot to get the desired effect. They also have an apparent effect on glucose intolerance related to one's gut biome, and it's not due to the taste - you can transfer the biome alone between mice and get a similar impact.
Example source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13793
E.g. it seems to affect brain functioning IIRC
You also have to consider other additives in the soda, such as acids that can damage your teeth, and the caffeine in diet coke.
"should", but it's really hard to find reliable information as to what actually happens since the internet is filled with FUD websites claiming aspartame gave their brother/grandma/cat/chair cancer.
> Methanol sounds threatening, but very little aspartame is needed to sweeten a beverage
Methanol is very toxic to humans, so that's a good thing.
> What's more unclear is whether the sugar-like taste of artificial sweeteners affect the body's blood sugar regulation.
Why would it?
The burden of proof should probably be on the side of those asserting safety of novel food components, and if that means waiting a full generation for the data to come in, so be it (note that animal tests don't really tell us enough, because metabolism doesn't seem that well conserved between species; there are plenty of things that humans can eat safely that animals can't and vice versa)
Human metabolism and our food has coevolved over thousands of years, and we have evidence in the fossil record that shifts in diet (e.g. agriculture, pastoralism) had negative impacts on human health (worse teeth, shorter, weaker bones) until either our genomes or microbiomes adjusted.
If you decide to consume large quantities of novel ingredients in combinations that no humans have ever eaten before in our evolutionary history, then sure, it may turn out just fine—but metabolism is an intricate dance and there are a lot of ways to screw it up.
"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." and "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." seem like sensible advice for people who can afford to follow it [1].
[1] https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090323/7-rules-for...
I think we're pretty close to having a full generation's worth of data, considering it was approved by the FDA in 1981.
I believe the theory goes something like: the taste of sweetness causes changes in the body in preparation for a carbohydrate load.
How much truth there is in this claim is left as an exercise for the reader.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3916844/ :
> Carbohydrate (CHO) mouth rinse is defined as a CHO fluid distribution around the mouth for 5 to 10 s with subsequent expulsion by spitting. The utilization of either a low-concentrated 6.0% to 6.4% glucose or partially hydrolyzed maltodextrin are the most common CHO used, with the latter being colorless and tasteless when dissolved in water.
...
> CHO mouth rinse seems to improve performance during moderate- to high-intensity exercise (~60% to 75% VO2max), of at least 1 h duration. It is probable that the mechanism involved in this improvement may not be metabolic but neural, via oral CHO receptors (glucose and maltodextrin) that activate brain regions related to the sensation of reward and pleasure.
Note that it apparently isn't taste that is having the effect, as (according to this paper) maltodextrin, when dissolved in water, doesn't have a taste. So apparently there's some mechanism other than either ingestion (metabolic) or taste.
I meant my last line not as a disputation against, but only as an indicator that I was, at the time, too lazy to provide references.
At least according to a BBC documentary http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/51yxBQyvqpNYPT3PF0L...
How is this unclear... every study I've seen shows that artificial sweeteners are similarly obesogenic to actual sugar. Some of them also spike blood sugar quite a bit.
Several studies have also showed that artificial sweeteners change gut bacteria. One study I can't find right now showed a single dose of sucralose significantly changed gut bacteria composition. Here is an article about this concept from Sci Am https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweete...
I think the article is saying that it isn't that simple, because even small amounts of certain additives can change the microbiome.
More articles:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/17/349270927/di...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweete...
I would like to know what feedback path could possibly exist to enable this.
Different diet sodas use different artificial sweeteners, so diet soda cannot be treated as a single group. Diet Coke uses only aspartame as sweetener; Coke Zero combines aspartame and acesulfame K to create a more realistic taste.
I readily believe that any diet soda sweetened purely with aspartame is harmless. The chemical structure of aspartame is such that stomach acids should break it down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol, the first two being ordinary amino acids. Methanol sounds threatening, but very little aspartame is needed to sweeten a beverage. I thus have no problem drinking diet coke.
What's more unclear is whether the sugar-like taste of artificial sweeteners affect the body's blood sugar regulation.