In what appears to be a truly classic case of false advertising, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo call their artificially sweetened colas Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi.

Why false advertising?

It turns out that in recent years, many scientific studies link artificial sweeteners to weight gain, not weight loss.

That’s right. Artificial sweeteners are linked to weight gain, type 2 diabetes, increased appetite, metabolic disorders, obesity, and other conditions that are the opposite of the meaning of the term “diet.”

Talk about sickeningly sweet.

At U.S. Right to Know, we expose what the food industry doesn’t want you to know.

And we think it’s time to can the false advertising. So, on April 9th, we asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop allowing Coke and Pepsi to use the term “diet” for Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, because they likely cause weight gain, not weight loss.

That might just take the “fizz” out of diet soda sales.

Call us old-fashioned, but we think that if a product is labeled diet, it should actually help you to lose weight – and it most certainly should not make you gain weight

And we don’t want any other kind of artificially sweetened false advertising to bubble up. That’s why we also asked FTC and FDA to investigate all other food products containing artificial sweeteners using the term diet or implying weight loss, to determine whether those products are falsely advertised, branded and labeled.

Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame, and Diet Pepsi with aspartame and acesulfame potatssium.

There are many reasons to be especially concerned about aspartame. Why? In addition to links to weight gain, aspartame has been linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, higher rates of mortality, brain damage and shortened pregnancies, among many other things.

Hopefully, one of these days, the FDA will pull aspartame from the market. But until they do so, at a minimum, FDA and FTC should tell Coca-Cola and PepsiCo that they can’t use the word “diet” to advertise, brand or label their artificially sweetened sodas.