I was raised drinking soda as the default… water was never something we’d willingly drink. In middle school I noticed that every day I’d get home from school with a splitting headache and I’d take a couple of aspirin and wash it down with a Coke and the headache would go away. My parents realized that it was likely caffeine withdrawal… so instead of cutting out soda, they started getting me caffeine free soda.

It wasn’t until my older brother was in his late 30s and experienced kidney failure and required a transplant that I realized I needed to make a change. I switched over to water and unsweet tea as my defaults. Even after his transplant my brother still would only drink soda… he didn’t survive Covid. And today my mom routinely has kidney issues but still refuses to drink water.

Everyone in my family, except for me, has diabetes and kidney issues. I’m sure my 30+ years of daily soda drinking will catch up to me, but I do credit cutting soda out of my diet as having a major positive impact on my overall health.

Its bad. Your body still has to process everything in that thats not water and none of it is a positive for the body. Drink water by default and make soda a treat

You can abuse your body a hell of a lot up to that age without too many issues. Those issues will start hitting home within the next decade or so though. Make a change for the better while you can.

I did that. My teeth are ruined, my breath is nearly always bad. I’ve had more root canals than is responsible, and it’s been massively expensive.

Drink water and brush your teeth.

Its not good. Caffeinated sodas are a diathetic and it will pull water out of your system. Check out ChubbyEmu’s Channel on YouTube for the explanation. If you have been drinking exclusively sodas since a child with no water in take you could be damaging your liver and kidneys. Also I would strongly suggest taking a muti-vitimin daily. Most diet sodas make it harder for you to absorb certain nutrients like folic acid and IIRC B-12.

If you were one of the people that Aspartame is an issue you would know it by know because almost every time you drank soda you would have a headache. You are probably getting more of them just from the dehydration.

Then there are the dental issues. I don’t care how old you are, start using sensodyne and look at having your teeth sealed. Your dentist can do wonders that were not possible 15 years ago, but that will give you issues.

Now a while back there was a thing about sodas and diet sodas raising your risk of Cancer but you would have to drink 6L+ a day. Lower amounts are believed to actually fight against cancer cells in their early stages.

Seems like a recipe for kidney stones and a crippling caffeine dependency.

Everybody is different, could be fine could be developing issues that won’t by symptomatic until later. Best way to find out is to ask a doctor who can take a family history, run tests to see if you’re within normal ranges, ask medically relevant questions, etc.

I have this issue as well, I drank a lot of soda since I was a kid and when I’m not drinking soda, I drink carbonated water… Managed to take a little break recently but I feel it’s coming back.

My teeth are ok, nothing major. I’m slightly overweight, but that’s more due to the anti-depressant I’m taking.

Drink some water, dawg. Please.

Even sugar-free drinks are suspected to increase your chance of diabetes, obesity, and a wide variety of other health issues. High consumption of artifically sweetened beverages are suspected to increase your likelihood of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer, notably a large increase in cholecystectomies, which you say you’ve had.

Here’s a long review of smaller-scale studies of a variety of associations and/or suspected causations of diet soda consumption - Notably arterial disease and “remodelling”, Weight gain, Depression in later life, Eating disorders, impaired cognitive development, hip fractures, UTIs, Diabetic retinopathy, End-stage renal disease, Leukemia and lymphoma, and overall mortality. The review concluded that by objective standards, the included studies were all at least of “moderate” quality.

Need I go on?

Is a lot of that going to be correlative? For sure yeah. Is it still maybe a very good idea to incorporate more water into your diet? Also yeah.

Not a doctor or anything, but I imagine it could be this bad: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwan-hospital-removes-over-300-kidney-stones-from-woman-who-prefers-bubble-tea-to-plain-water

How do you do in summers where you need to drink liters of fluids to stay hydrated?

There’s the thing that people rarely mention when they say this is bad for your health…

There might soon come a day you’ll be sitting in the toilet feeling pain and start wondering “should I just use my hands to scoop the shit out of my ass?”

Water is amazing. It comes out of taps. It’s practically free.

Bad. Best regards from your older age.