This past weekend we had a birthday party for our daughter Olivia. And as with many parties like this there was food, cake and drinks. [caption id="attachment_4341" align="aligncenter" width="300"] What healthy people drink, right? Because we're all trying to do the best we can with our health we have diet pop as an offering. And I'm sure many of you are the same. If you drink pop you probably opt for the diet version, right? Not many health conscious people are buying regular Coke or Pepsi when they do the grocery shopping. So why do we choose diet pop? Well I guess it has to do with the fact that we don't want empty calories. I mean if I'm going to eat or drink something I better be getting some kind of nutritional benefit from it such as protein, healthy fat, vitamins, minerals, hydration etc. Regular pop offers virtually none of these but does have a dose of sugar, carbonation and is acidic. But besides avoiding the extra calories by drinking diet pop the other reason to avoid it was for the fact it wouldn't alter our blood sugar levels. In other words we didn't have to be concerned with the connection to type II diabetes and other metabolic disorders. Until now. A new study in the journal Nature found that consuming an artificial sweetener may impair glucose metabolism similar to that seen in type II diabetics. In the study researchers fed mice and humans one of three treatments, glucose, saccharin (the artificial sweetener) or glucose. You may be familiar with saccharin as the sweetener in Sweet N Low. Anyways, only the group fed saccharin showed altered glucose metabolism. So what is taking place that is accounting for this altered glucose metabolism? Well it appears that the mice and people fed saccharin...