Recent studies have found that women who frequently consume diet sodas may be more at risk for heart attacks, blood clots and other cardiovascular problems than women who don’t drink diet sodas.

The results are from a study of 60,000 postmenopausal women that examined their habits with artificially sweetened drinks such as diet soda and diet fruit drinks.

The researchers took inquired about the women’s consumption of diet drinks, and divided them into four groups, depending on their artificially sweetened drink habits.

Nine years later, they revisited the subjects and examined how their health was, especially investigating their cardiovascular health for problems like blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, or even death.

The results are staggering: heavy consumers of diet soda and other diet drinks are about 30 percent more likely to have serious heart problems when compared with women who rarely or never consume diet drinks.

The number of women who were labeled as frequent, but not heavy, consumers of diet soda and other diet drinks who had a major heart event was about three percent higher than those who did not consume diet beverages.

There are some limitations to the study, in that they followed women over time, asking about habits that had long been in place, they couldn’t prove that they were actually the cause of the heart problems.

The findings still have to be scrutinized by outside experts and published in a medial journal before they can be considered legitimate.

However, with these findings and with the wealth of knowledge of the deleterious health effects of artificially flavored diet sodas, perhaps it might be time to put down the can.