When doctors tell you soda will kill you, they’re usually right. But there’s an oddly specific scenario where cracking open a cold Diet Coke might actually save your life—or at least your stomach.
A team of doctors from Massachusetts recently documented a striking case in the New England Journal of Medicine: an elderly woman with a gastric benzoar—essentially a giant ball of undigested food lodged in her stomach—who managed to dissolve it by drinking 1.5 liters of Diet Coke per day. The woman had been dealing with severe abdominal pain and right-side discomfort for about a month before seeking help. Over-the-counter acid reflux medications proved useless, and her accelerating weight loss signaled something was seriously wrong.
Here’s where the story gets interesting: she’d been taking semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist similar to Ozempic, which had helped her shed 40 pounds in a year. The problem is that GLP-1 drugs slow gastric emptying—meaning food moves through the stomach at a snail’s pace. Sometimes this causes undigested material to clump into a benzoar. An endoscopy confirmed the diagnosis, and doctors immediately pulled her off the weight loss medication.
Surgery is sometimes necessary to remove these masses, but the first line of defense is to try dissolving them chemically. And yes, cola works. The mechanism remains a bit mysterious—the doctors acknowledged it’s unclear whether the acidity, carbonation, or something else does the heavy lifting—but the evidence supports administering 3 liters of cola within a 12-hour window. Because of her diabetes, this woman was prescribed diet soda, and because she disliked carbonation, her regimen was scaled back to 1.5 liters daily. It still worked spectacularly. By day two, she felt a tugging sensation in her stomach, and the nausea vanished. A follow-up endoscopy showed the benzoar was gone.
Gastric benzoars show up in fewer than 0.5% of endoscopies, so you’re unlikely to encounter one. But if you do, or if someone you know does, it’s reassuring to know that one of the cheapest, easiest, and least invasive treatments is right there at the convenience store. The doctors concluded that cola administration is cost-effective and carries lower complication risk than surgery—a rare case where junk food might actually be the prescription you need.
