Calorie counters, take note next time you head out to the bar: Mixing diet soda with alcohol will get you intoxicated faster than if you were to sip on a regular mixed drink.
A new study found that in addition to getting an individual drunk faster, these types of alcoholic beverages also affect your ability to make responsible decisions.
That last part seems obvious enough. After all, your ability to make responsible decisions is affected by alcohol every time you get drunk, but a single diet soda mixer has now been shown to increase one's breath alcohol content (BAC) by almost 20 percent without making you feel more drunk. For context, that's a BAC level that tends to be associated with two drinks, not one.
This raises the possibility that a diet soda drinker could decide to drive a car with a BAC over the legal limit, even though they don't feel any different than an individual drinking with regular soda.
"One of the key things we found was that even though BAC peaked 18% higher in the diet condition, [participants] didn't feel any more intoxicated and they didn't feel any different as to how willing they were to drive a car," said the study's lead author Cecile Marczinski, assistant professor of psychology at Northern Kentucky University, to Time.
Researchers tested 16 people on three separate occasions by having them drink either a vodka and Squirt, a vodka and diet Squirt, or a placebo drink. After measuring their BAC each time, researchers put them through a computer test designed to measure impairment
"They are more impaired on the computer task, measured both by reaction time and errors," Marczinski said about those drinking diet mixers. "You shouldn't trust your own judgment of impairment. In one case, the subjects were safe to drive and legal, and in the other case, they were not, but they had no idea."
The underlying reason for these results is that when the body intakes calories from either food or sugary drinks, it begins digesting those calories, reducing a drinker's BAC. However, with diet sodas , "the stomach doesn't recognize that it needs to do anything with that drink, because it has no sugar. It goes right to small intestine where the most alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream," said Marczinski.
Keep that in mind next time you head out for a drink.
