By Michelle CastilloMixing alcohol with diet soda may cut down on calories, but it could be making you more drunk.
A new study, which is set to be published in the April edition of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, shows that people who drank with a diet mixer had a higher breath alcohol content (BrAC) than people who mixed booze with non-diet beverages.
Researchers had 16 subjects drink one of three different beverages -- Squirt and alcohol, diet Squirt and alcohol and a placebo beverage -- on three separate occasions until they had sampled all the options. They then measured the BrAC using a breathalyzer and asked subjects how drunk they felt, how tired they felt, whether they felt impaired and if they felt they could drive. The subjects also completed a reaction time task on a computer.
The diet drinkers averaged a peak BrAC level of 0.091 g/210 L, which was 18 percent higher than the sugary mixer group, which averaged 0.077 g/210 L. Diet drinkers also had the worst performance in the reaction time test. However, subjects said they felt the same level of drunkness when drinking the diet or the regular mixture.
"One of the key things we found was that even though (BrAC) peaked 18 percent 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," lead author Cecile Marczinski, an assistant professor of psychology at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Ky., told TIME.
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