Lap Bands and Caffeine II

I’m getting a lot of traffic through here wondering whether caffeine is allowed after a lap band. I suspect the question is about drinking coffee, so we are dealing with three separate issues in this case:
1. coffee
2. caffeine
3. artificial sweetners

Some of the physician sites warn against drinking coffee because it is a diuretic and thus, causes your body to lose fluid. And because bandees are restricted in the amount they can consume, they must be careful to drink proper amounts of water. If your cup of coffee is flushing the fluids you do drink right back out, that’s bad for you especially if you’re getting just enough in the first place. Other physicians are fine with coffee but require you to drink it black or use sweeteners.

However, caffeine itself may well be a problem for people who want to lose weight. Researchers at Duke University have now documented that caffeine causes blood glucose level to spike (at least in Type 2 diabetics) after meals and that alone, my friend, will make it harder for you to lose weight – most likely whether you are diabetic or not (though the referenced study only deals with diabetics).

Sweetners are also problematic. A recent study by Lyn Steffen at the University of Minnesota found that people who consumed even one can of diet soda a day were more likely to develop metabolic syndrome -the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure – than people who didn’t. What researchers suspect is that your body tasting something sweet, gears up for a big calorie dump. When it doesn’t get the calories it’s expecting, it responds by holding on even tighter to the next batch of calories it does get and you gain weight.

In short, there is not an accepted standard on the issue of caffeine consumption and lap bands. From the point of view of this coffee and tea with cream and sweetner lover, there is plenty of reason to avoid both caffeine and artificial sweetners if your goal is weight loss. What to do? What to do? Listen to your doctor, I guess.