Be careful with diet drinks!

Don't depend on diet soda to help you lose weight. A new study shows that overweight and obese people who drink diet beverages consume more calories from food than heavy people who consume sugary drinks, according to a new Johns Hopkins study.

“When you make that switch from a sugary beverage for a diet beverage, you’re often not changing other things in your diet,” says lead researcher Sara Bleich, associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Bleich and other Johns Hopkins researchers used data from the 1999-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. For this study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, they analyzed participants’ recollection of what they’d had to eat and drink over the past 24 hours.