Diet Sodas

I have heard that diet drinks are bad for you. What is the effects of drinking diet drinks?

Not sure, but considering I drink a liter or so of diet Dr. Pepper a day, I'm interested to find out.

Look up 'aspartame' or 'phenylalanine'. Thats the ingredient in diet sodas, sugar free sweets, canderelle etc...
The wikipedia page at the moment seems to say that its safe: Aspartame controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but not long ago it said the opposite (check the history and talk of this page). So that kinda shows how divided people are over it

The official government stance is that it is safe Food Standards Agency - Aspartame
and most sites that say that it is poisonous seem to look a bit crazy ASPARTAME CONSUMPTION IS NEVER SAFE

Just remember it is possible to cherry-pick scientific research papers to get any result you want, thats why its important to do your own research and not just believe whatever some website tells you (the 'official' websites or otherwise).

Personally, I avoid aspartame for 2 reasons:
1: Better safe than sorry, its probably safe but I would rather not risk it.
2: It doesnt kill sugar-craving. It might taste sweet, but your body knows its not real sugar so you just crave it more afterwards. I would rather just have a can of regular coke and work it off afterwards.

I once decided to completely avoid for a year it to see if it effected my mood...(it didnt). Once you start trying to cut it out completely, you realise how much food and drinks it is really in (cider, yoghurts, etc etc). And you realise how difficult it is to take out of your diet completely.
Its a kinda shame that it is so hard to avoid, I would like more choice about such things.

I wanted to know because I love soda, but it is bad for you. Diet drinks taste (almost) the same. I would like to think it is safe, but I just don't know...

I've heard many times over that aspartame kills brain cells. :P Other than that, I haven't heard anything else. But the aftertaste... Yuck! I'm definitely not a fan of diet drinks.

Funny thing about aspartame, it's many hundreds of times sweeter than normal sugar. For this reason, it takes very little of it to produce an equivalent taste.

Open up a sachet of artificial sweetener (usually aspartame or splenda) and look at the contents very closely, you'll see a few transparent crystals (the sweetener) spread out around a bunch of white granules which are just useless bulking material to give the package volume.