My stance: it's best to drink water when being thirsty. Always.

At some point fizzy sugary drinks were promoted as something nice and special to use when celebrating birthdays. (I think it's a very bad idea to promote it as such, it's best to avoid it at all. Children growing up without being 'forced' to like fizzy sugary drinks are nice actually don't like it). At some point the price of the fizzy sugary drinks became low enough that quite some middle class people started using them as an everyday drink. I had many friends in my youth that didn't drink water at all.

Then came the health scare and people were told that sugary fizzy drinks are bad, but people were still hooked. So the industry came up with a "solution" to the "problem" they caused themselves - sugar free fizzy drinks loaded with artificial sweeteners! Oh the irony. Why not just drink water instead?

Do I follow up personally? I drink too much beer. Over the last years (as CO2-dispensers have become quite a commonplace item both in households and in the office spaces) I've started drinking fizzy water. Why? I don't know. It doesn't add any health benefits as far as I know, it is yet another product that most of us don't like at first - I didn't like it at all in my youth, and only in the recent years have I come to prefer fizzy water over still water. It's not acid enough to be bad for teeth as far as I've heard - but still water is certainly safer. Some few times I've been drinking fizzy bottled water with a hint of artificial flavoring ... but I don't like that much, and I will avoid it.