This is actually a solid study, despite what the current top comment might suggest. It's frustrating how frequently shallow, dismissive takes that don't engage with the substance of a paper rise to the top on HN. I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks.
If you're going to criticize a study, the least you can do is read it carefully and refer to specific sections and quote specific excerpts where you believe the authors went wrong. Anything less is just noise.
arghwhat · 8h ago
One important note (also mentioned in the study) is that this may be a reverse causality.
Their study also indicates an association between high Artificially Sweetened Beverage ("ASB" in the study) consumption and high total calorie intake/obesity. The link may therefore that obesity was the cause of all diabetes incidents and that obese individuals tend to want to reduce weight by drinking diet soda (and are less likely to have preference for foods and drinks traditionally considered healthy like plain water or tea), without the diet soda consumption itself being a contributing factor.
(There will be many correlations like this - e.g., if you look at statistics for knee problems you might find a large overlap between people with diabetes and with knee problems, because obesity causes both more load on the knees and a higher risk of diabetes.)
Quote:
> The mechanisms linking high habitual consumption of ASBs and the risk of type 2 diabetes are not fully understood. It is suggested that reverse causality between obesity and ASB intake may partly explain the observed association, where individuals with relatively high BMI at baseline might be using ASB to try to reduce weight and follow a healthy lifestyle [35,37]. Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with supportive of obesity being a confounder of the association.
khelavastr · 7h ago
The conclusions reported are extremely low quality. The research is fine, but only shows an association and not causation.
I agree that people at high risk of diabetes are probably much more likely to drink diet soft drinks than average people
blenderob · 6h ago
I don't believe they claim causality either... unless I overlooked something. Their conclusion advocating for public health measures feels over the top!
The paper does explore the possibility of a linkage and attempts to justify why the observed relationship may be more than just a simple association. They even go a step further by presenting arguments against the likelihood of reverse causality. That they need to consider reverse causality and prepare a defense against it is sort of admitting that they are far from proving causality.
Here are some excerpts from the paper that illustrate this:
A sensitivity analysis excluding cases at the first follow-up was conducted to examine whether the observed association reflects a possible reverse causality."
Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with obesity being a confounder of the association."
In addition, to rule out the likelihood of reverse causality, we interpreted appropriate models and conducted sensitivity analyses, which strengthen the robustness of our findings."
The authors also include three pages of data, though I neither have the time nor the statistical expertise to evaluate it in depth.
What's frustrating is that the paper never explicitly states that causality is NOT established. While they argue against reverse causality, the absence of reverse causality does not, in itself, imply causality. It may still be a case of correlation. So your point is completely valid.
No comments yet
jsbisviewtiful · 1h ago
> I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks.
Some folks are gleefully holding open the doors to let measles and polio back into society.
beardyw · 11h ago
I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. The diet I went onto more or less cut out anything sweet. It's surprising how quickly I became sensitive to sweetness and now I just don't want it. And blood tests show the diet worked. Life goes on without sweet!
stolencode · 11h ago
I gave up sugar because of my poor tooth health. My taste preference also quickly changed. It's surprising how many American products have ridiculous amounts of sugar added to them, how difficult it is to find unadulterated products, and how little sweetener foods actually require to have their flavor perfectly enhanced.
The sweetest I can tolerate is the 1/4 tsp of raw honey I add to my oatmeal. There are very few restaurants I can eat at any more and most processed foods taste and smell horrible.
arghwhat · 8h ago
If you truly mean tolerate, then your sensitivity might be a bit in the extreme. I wouldn't expect anyone to be bothered by eating a bit of pure sugar or honey even if they prefer their food unsweetened.
But yes, a lot of food is excessively oversweetened (it's a cheap way to win kids and therefore long-term habits), and you become desensitized to anything you constantly taste and will notice differences when you stop.
However, everyone has different taste, both genetically and because of whatever else they eat and is more or less sensitive to, so there's no such thing as "flavor perfectly enhanced", only your own particular preference for a particular dish. Someone eating less sour or being genetically predisposed to bitter might violently disagree with your flavoring for example.
ZeroGravitas · 12h ago
These things are all so confusingly written I can't help but feel it's a pro sugar conspiracy.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, drinking sugary beverages makes you fat, and then you only have a 23% higher chance of diabetes than an equally fat person who doesn't drink sugary sodas.
While drinking artificially sweetened drinks doesn't make you fat but does make you more likely to have diabetes than an equally non-fat person.
So the obvious but unanswered question seems to be, would you rather be fat and have the absolute risk of diabetes 23% more than that standard fat person plus other health problems of being overweight, or be thinner and have a 43% more chance of diabetes than a thinner person? What's the actual risk, not percentage increase compared with different baselines?
Answering that straightforward question would let you know "is it better to drink artificial sweetened than sugary beverages" that always seems to go unanswered in these studies while heavily implying that it's worse than sugar, presumably because they're funded by big sugar.
somenameforme · 11h ago
The simple answer is not to drink sweetened beverages - period, regardless of what it is sweetened with.
ZeroGravitas · 12h ago
Replying to myself:
> Obesity is considered the main modifiable risk factor for type 2 diabetes, and it's estimated to account for 80-85% of the overall risk, according to Nice CKS
ggm · 12h ago
I think its It's multivariate conditional. The sweetener doesn't provide direct calorific input, but that encourages more to be drunk and so exacerbates the problem. Weight for weight liquids taken, to energy, to signal received by endocrine system, to outcome on blood sugar levels.
Now add genetic variability to risk/predisposition, exercise levels, bmi, gender, age, co-morbidities..
zihotki · 11h ago
There is nothing in the article or studies to justify your point about encouragement. The points raised at the start of the thread are still very valid - who participated in the study and whether there were other important factors which were negleted intentionally or not.
Anecdotal point - I'm fit, it doesn't matter if I drink sugar free soda or water. My calorie intake doesn't change because of that at all. It changes due to other factors like lack of sleep or stress levels.
mbirth · 9h ago
Do we know of a T2 epidemic in the UK? Because they have a sugar tax and basically everything is artificially sweetened.
andsoitis · 12h ago
Drink water!
Or even flavored water, like LaCroix, or Bubbly, if you want some pizazz.
Soda is poison.
vorgol · 11h ago
Exactly. The enormously forceful craving you get for soda/beer/whatever drink will be wiped out 90%-100% by a quick chug of water.
Your brain will tell you "no that won't work", but after the water your body will approve and your brain will accept that.
somenameforme · 11h ago
No idea what LaCroix or Bubbly are, but there's a million flavors of tea and coffee. Coffee is the weirdest thing ever because one would intuitively expect it ought be unhealthy, but it seems to endlessly correlate positively with health. Obviously I mean just plain coffee - not the diabetes in a cup served at places like Starbucks.
JohnBooty · 4h ago
If a person really craves "fizzy sweetness"... here's what I do for myself.
4 parts seltzer water + ice
1 part lemonade
It's 50 calories, or something like that (obviously depends on lemonade, size of drinking glass, etc)
fulfills my sweetness craving and is also filling
makingstuffs · 9h ago
Not sure if you are referring to the US meaning of soda (as in pop in the UK) or actual soda water (essentially fizzy water with sodium bicarbonate in it).
If it is the latter can I ask what this is based on? Genuinely interested, not being snarky or anything like that.
That was my thinking, too, but life has taught me that I am a blithering idiot who is often wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
herbst · 11h ago
Also don't fall for holy or other synthetically sweetened brands of "water flavor powder" there are alternatives with real or no sugar (even if there aren't a lot)
It's probably super local still but I really do like "teaballs"
xnx · 7h ago
> flavored water, like LaCroix, or Bubbly,
Spindrift the best. Water with light bubbles and a splash of real fruit juice. ~10 calories
emsy · 11h ago
"I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."
- President Donald Trump
JohnBooty · 4h ago
I wouldn't exactly put it that way but I've known a lot of people who take great care of their bodies and I never see them going anywhere near diet soda
mort96 · 10h ago
Guessing that's because he doesn't hang out with thin people much? I see thin people drink diet coke literally all the time
michalu · 11h ago
Typical bogus study. This shows exactly what's the problem with most of these studies.
So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60.
The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.
So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.
People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem.
Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.
And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US.
So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result.
Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease.
Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation.
Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.
Avalaxy · 11h ago
> Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.
What a bizarre statement. I have no health problems and will always pick the 'zero' variant of any soda, because to me it tastes exactly the same, but minus all the calories.
hilbert42 · 10h ago
"What a bizarre statement."
Exactly, I don't have diabetes and I always choose the sugar-free ones because of their reduced calories.
I'm not implying that artificial sweeteners are completely safe as I simply don't know—and that's the real problem.
What's damn annoying about these studies is that there are many artificial sweeteners with vastly different chemical structures but generally they're all lumped together. If the gut microbiome is affected and it increases diabetes risk then it's hard to believe that these vastly different chemistries would all have the same effect.
On the other hand, if the body responds badly to the sensation of sweetness then that could explain the result—all other factors being equal.
It seems obvious to me the first job is to determine whether sweetness itself is a factor before anything else.
The 'debate' over artificial sweeteners has been raging for many decades and it's high time it was resolved to avoid confusion. For example where I am the star rating system gives artificially sweetened drinks typically 3.5/5 versus a worse figure of 1–2/5 for those sweetened with sugar.
We need to have faith in officially sanctioned government health warnings.
bjackman · 11h ago
Yeah I actively prefer diet drinks. Consuming 40g of sugar felt good when I was 10, but since around puberty it mostly makes my mouth feel sticky and my body feel dehydrated. Often it gives me a headache.
However despite my strong objection to this point in the post I'm still very sympathetic to the idea that this study is bullshit.
(AND I also think drinking sweetened drinks every day is likely a bad idea. I just think this is very hard to prove. I think almost all nutritional claims finer-grained than "eating lots of vegetables seems to be good for you" are probably poorly founded and we are mostly forced to operate on vibes).
stolencode · 11h ago
> because to me it tastes exactly the same
Mimi: "If you close your eyes."
throwaway150 · 11h ago
Not everyone is a soda connoisseur like you. I get it, some people refuse to drink anything but the original cola. But not everyone is like that. Some of us have a reduced ability to distinguish differences in taste, myself included. To me, the diet and regular versions taste exactly the same, whether my eyes are open or shut.
This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola. Many many healthy people with no health problems have the diet version!
stolencode · 11h ago
> Not everyone is a soda connoisseur like you
You need not be a connoisseur to notice that they're not _exactly_ the same.
> This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola.
Yea, my message, it's a quote from the musical "Rent." Was this whimsy worth your rudeness?
mzhaase · 11h ago
I know plenty of people who drink diet soda who are healthy and have good diets otherwise, because they want to avoid the insulin spike / insulin resistance that comes with high sugar intake.
Claiming such a large study is bogus requires a more statistically founded argument than "I think people who drink diet soda are unhealthy to begin with".
herbst · 11h ago
I don't agree. In many countries diet soda is the way more common thing at this point (sugar taxes) ex. Mainland Spain basically every soda except coca cola is based on sweetener instead of sugar.
It turns out it's not the "obvious" better choice they wanted it to be. So looking into it is definitely interesting.
michalu · 11h ago
It's a common thing but not 40-60 age group. The demographics of diet soda consumers in Europe is 25-44. The old guys drink it because they have to.
blenderob · 10h ago
> It's a common thing but not 40-60 age group.
Where are you pulling these stats from? Do you have any references or do you just keep misrepresenting your personal observations as facts?
I sure do see my 40-60 age group friends and acquaintances going for more diet soda than regular soda. So I find it hard to believe that diet soda is not a common thing in the 40-60 age group.
It is frustrating that for someone who posted strong criticism against a research paper, you keep making bold claims without presenting any references or evidence!
michalu · 5h ago
is it really that hard to put "diet soda age demographics europe" into google these are consumer data not some studies from MIT published in paid journals.
DIY at least you'll know I'm not referencing selectively.
blenderob · 3h ago
It's not difficult to run that search on Google, but since I'm not very familiar with Europe, I wouldn't know which sources are credible or relevant. If you're already knowledgeable about this topic, it would be far more helpful if you could share references to support your claims directly. That way, we can avoid unnecessary back-and-forth in this thread.
For example, when I did search, I came across this source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d.... However, I'm not convinced it supports your point that this trend is 'common' but not in the 40–60 age group. The data show that 5% of people aged 40–60 use it, compared to 12% in the under-40 group. That doesn't strike me as a large enough gap to justify saying it's common in one group but not in the other.
jemmyw · 10h ago
I'm 42 and I drink 1 diet ginger beer every day. I don't have a problem with sugar (eating chocolate as I write this), I just didn't want the extra calories. I'm in good health otherwise, slightly overweight but 4-6 hours intense sport a week plus walks and runs and some weight lifting at home. Diet soda tastes fine to me. I know people who love the taste of diet coke.
I don't necessarily disagree with you in general, but you're also pulling ideas out of the air. Better to point out the problems with the study than claim that people only drink diet soda for XYZ reason because I think you'd need a whole study to figure out the edges of who drinks what and why.
blenderob · 5h ago
> The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.
Yes, we don't! And that's perfectly acceptable.
When you're studying a cohort aged 40 to 60, you don't try to reconstruct their exact diet or lifestyle from two decades earlier. You don't rely on their memories from age 20 and treat that as reliable data. It simply isn't.
It's okay not to know what cannot be known, and still move forward with meaningful research. If scientific studies were only allowed to proceed after accounting for every possible confounding variable, then no health research would ever be conducted. None. Zero. Because it's impossible to identify and control for every unknown factor.
What researchers do is control for the known variables, publish their findings, and invite scrutiny. Other researchers then explore new confounding factors, conduct follow-up studies, and expand or refine the conclusions. That's the essence of scientific progress. That's how human knowledge evolves.
It is, frankly, lazy and armchair critiquing to dismiss a study simply because it didn't account for your favorite confounding variable. You know what's not lazy and armchair? Actually conducting research that investigates that variable. And that's when you come to appreciate just how difficult or outright infeasible some of these variables are to measure or control for.
mort96 · 11h ago
> Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad.
I mean I just don't agree? I'm young-ish (approaching 30), don't have a problem with excessive sugar in my diet, I don't have medical conditions which make sugar a problem, but most of the time when I drink soda I pick one without sugar. I find it tastes fine and I don't exactly want more sugar in my diet.
I'm not saying that your comments about bias introduced by the selection criteria is wrong, I haven't read the study so I don't know if they corrected for it or designed the study in a way which makes it a non-issue. But you seem to have some very strong personal preferences regarding soda, and you've assumed that those personal preferences are universal. They're not.
No comments yet
throwaway150 · 11h ago
> So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.
What a bogus claim! Plenty of people drink artificially sweetened drinks because they don't want to enjoy a soda but not add calories to their daily consumption! Which world do you live in? Have you even been to cinema lately? I bet every other person orders a diet soda before entering the theatre. I know because I see it happen all the time all around me!
guelo · 11h ago
Typical bogus HN comment on a science article. Without reading the paper you somehow assume you're smarter than the researchers and that they didn't control for different population factors.
michalu · 11h ago
I read the paper. Have you ever done a study like that? How would you feel if after 14 years it found no surprising result that would warrant some media attention? You adjust then you adjust, Spearman let's try Pearson instead etc.
Actually show me a 10+ year study that found no surprising result.
If the fact that bunch of foundational Alzheimer's studies were found to be faked recently by a guy who profited from them for 20 years and many such cases doesn't make you more realistic then well ... you must have an exceptionally good heart :)
guelo · 10h ago
Ok so you're obviously not a fan of scientists and are throwing out about a bunch of whatabouts, but the fact remains that in this paper they controlled for a bunch of confounders and your original comment said they didn't. I guess the charitable interpretation of your reply is that even though the paper says they controlled for those factors you think that they're lying because of your general skepticism about science.
michalu · 4h ago
This study is weak -> you don't like science. 0 valuable discussion. When did scientism fans make it to HN?
guelo · 4h ago
Scientism? You really don't want to talk about how this paper has controls for things you said that it didn't have controls for.
nektaars · 11h ago
"Then, the association of sweetened beverage intake with the incidence of type 2 diabetes was assessed using modified Poisson regression and adjusted for lifestyle, obesity, socioeconomic and other confounding factors."
michalu · 11h ago
yeah age smoking drinking income what a complete picture
This is actually a solid study, despite what the current top comment might suggest. It's frustrating how frequently shallow, dismissive takes that don't engage with the substance of a paper rise to the top on HN. I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks.
If you're going to criticize a study, the least you can do is read it carefully and refer to specific sections and quote specific excerpts where you believe the authors went wrong. Anything less is just noise.
Their study also indicates an association between high Artificially Sweetened Beverage ("ASB" in the study) consumption and high total calorie intake/obesity. The link may therefore that obesity was the cause of all diabetes incidents and that obese individuals tend to want to reduce weight by drinking diet soda (and are less likely to have preference for foods and drinks traditionally considered healthy like plain water or tea), without the diet soda consumption itself being a contributing factor.
(There will be many correlations like this - e.g., if you look at statistics for knee problems you might find a large overlap between people with diabetes and with knee problems, because obesity causes both more load on the knees and a higher risk of diabetes.)
Quote:
> The mechanisms linking high habitual consumption of ASBs and the risk of type 2 diabetes are not fully understood. It is suggested that reverse causality between obesity and ASB intake may partly explain the observed association, where individuals with relatively high BMI at baseline might be using ASB to try to reduce weight and follow a healthy lifestyle [35,37]. Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with supportive of obesity being a confounder of the association.
I agree that people at high risk of diabetes are probably much more likely to drink diet soft drinks than average people
The paper does explore the possibility of a linkage and attempts to justify why the observed relationship may be more than just a simple association. They even go a step further by presenting arguments against the likelihood of reverse causality. That they need to consider reverse causality and prepare a defense against it is sort of admitting that they are far from proving causality.
Here are some excerpts from the paper that illustrate this:
The authors also include three pages of data, though I neither have the time nor the statistical expertise to evaluate it in depth.What's frustrating is that the paper never explicitly states that causality is NOT established. While they argue against reverse causality, the absence of reverse causality does not, in itself, imply causality. It may still be a case of correlation. So your point is completely valid.
No comments yet
Some folks are gleefully holding open the doors to let measles and polio back into society.
The sweetest I can tolerate is the 1/4 tsp of raw honey I add to my oatmeal. There are very few restaurants I can eat at any more and most processed foods taste and smell horrible.
But yes, a lot of food is excessively oversweetened (it's a cheap way to win kids and therefore long-term habits), and you become desensitized to anything you constantly taste and will notice differences when you stop.
However, everyone has different taste, both genetically and because of whatever else they eat and is more or less sensitive to, so there's no such thing as "flavor perfectly enhanced", only your own particular preference for a particular dish. Someone eating less sour or being genetically predisposed to bitter might violently disagree with your flavoring for example.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, drinking sugary beverages makes you fat, and then you only have a 23% higher chance of diabetes than an equally fat person who doesn't drink sugary sodas.
While drinking artificially sweetened drinks doesn't make you fat but does make you more likely to have diabetes than an equally non-fat person.
So the obvious but unanswered question seems to be, would you rather be fat and have the absolute risk of diabetes 23% more than that standard fat person plus other health problems of being overweight, or be thinner and have a 43% more chance of diabetes than a thinner person? What's the actual risk, not percentage increase compared with different baselines?
Answering that straightforward question would let you know "is it better to drink artificial sweetened than sugary beverages" that always seems to go unanswered in these studies while heavily implying that it's worse than sugar, presumably because they're funded by big sugar.
> Obesity is considered the main modifiable risk factor for type 2 diabetes, and it's estimated to account for 80-85% of the overall risk, according to Nice CKS
Now add genetic variability to risk/predisposition, exercise levels, bmi, gender, age, co-morbidities..
Anecdotal point - I'm fit, it doesn't matter if I drink sugar free soda or water. My calorie intake doesn't change because of that at all. It changes due to other factors like lack of sleep or stress levels.
Soda is poison.
Your brain will tell you "no that won't work", but after the water your body will approve and your brain will accept that.
4 parts seltzer water + ice
1 part lemonade
It's 50 calories, or something like that (obviously depends on lemonade, size of drinking glass, etc)
fulfills my sweetness craving and is also filling
If it is the latter can I ask what this is based on? Genuinely interested, not being snarky or anything like that.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18fyz9q/use_of_pop...
It's probably super local still but I really do like "teaballs"
Spindrift the best. Water with light bubbles and a splash of real fruit juice. ~10 calories
So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60.
The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.
So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.
People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem.
Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.
And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US.
So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result.
Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease.
Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation.
Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.
What a bizarre statement. I have no health problems and will always pick the 'zero' variant of any soda, because to me it tastes exactly the same, but minus all the calories.
Exactly, I don't have diabetes and I always choose the sugar-free ones because of their reduced calories.
I'm not implying that artificial sweeteners are completely safe as I simply don't know—and that's the real problem.
What's damn annoying about these studies is that there are many artificial sweeteners with vastly different chemical structures but generally they're all lumped together. If the gut microbiome is affected and it increases diabetes risk then it's hard to believe that these vastly different chemistries would all have the same effect.
On the other hand, if the body responds badly to the sensation of sweetness then that could explain the result—all other factors being equal.
It seems obvious to me the first job is to determine whether sweetness itself is a factor before anything else.
The 'debate' over artificial sweeteners has been raging for many decades and it's high time it was resolved to avoid confusion. For example where I am the star rating system gives artificially sweetened drinks typically 3.5/5 versus a worse figure of 1–2/5 for those sweetened with sugar.
We need to have faith in officially sanctioned government health warnings.
However despite my strong objection to this point in the post I'm still very sympathetic to the idea that this study is bullshit.
(AND I also think drinking sweetened drinks every day is likely a bad idea. I just think this is very hard to prove. I think almost all nutritional claims finer-grained than "eating lots of vegetables seems to be good for you" are probably poorly founded and we are mostly forced to operate on vibes).
Mimi: "If you close your eyes."
This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola. Many many healthy people with no health problems have the diet version!
You need not be a connoisseur to notice that they're not _exactly_ the same.
> This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola.
Yea, my message, it's a quote from the musical "Rent." Was this whimsy worth your rudeness?
Claiming such a large study is bogus requires a more statistically founded argument than "I think people who drink diet soda are unhealthy to begin with".
It turns out it's not the "obvious" better choice they wanted it to be. So looking into it is definitely interesting.
Where are you pulling these stats from? Do you have any references or do you just keep misrepresenting your personal observations as facts?
I sure do see my 40-60 age group friends and acquaintances going for more diet soda than regular soda. So I find it hard to believe that diet soda is not a common thing in the 40-60 age group.
It is frustrating that for someone who posted strong criticism against a research paper, you keep making bold claims without presenting any references or evidence!
DIY at least you'll know I'm not referencing selectively.
For example, when I did search, I came across this source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d.... However, I'm not convinced it supports your point that this trend is 'common' but not in the 40–60 age group. The data show that 5% of people aged 40–60 use it, compared to 12% in the under-40 group. That doesn't strike me as a large enough gap to justify saying it's common in one group but not in the other.
I don't necessarily disagree with you in general, but you're also pulling ideas out of the air. Better to point out the problems with the study than claim that people only drink diet soda for XYZ reason because I think you'd need a whole study to figure out the edges of who drinks what and why.
Yes, we don't! And that's perfectly acceptable.
When you're studying a cohort aged 40 to 60, you don't try to reconstruct their exact diet or lifestyle from two decades earlier. You don't rely on their memories from age 20 and treat that as reliable data. It simply isn't.
It's okay not to know what cannot be known, and still move forward with meaningful research. If scientific studies were only allowed to proceed after accounting for every possible confounding variable, then no health research would ever be conducted. None. Zero. Because it's impossible to identify and control for every unknown factor.
What researchers do is control for the known variables, publish their findings, and invite scrutiny. Other researchers then explore new confounding factors, conduct follow-up studies, and expand or refine the conclusions. That's the essence of scientific progress. That's how human knowledge evolves.
It is, frankly, lazy and armchair critiquing to dismiss a study simply because it didn't account for your favorite confounding variable. You know what's not lazy and armchair? Actually conducting research that investigates that variable. And that's when you come to appreciate just how difficult or outright infeasible some of these variables are to measure or control for.
I mean I just don't agree? I'm young-ish (approaching 30), don't have a problem with excessive sugar in my diet, I don't have medical conditions which make sugar a problem, but most of the time when I drink soda I pick one without sugar. I find it tastes fine and I don't exactly want more sugar in my diet.
I'm not saying that your comments about bias introduced by the selection criteria is wrong, I haven't read the study so I don't know if they corrected for it or designed the study in a way which makes it a non-issue. But you seem to have some very strong personal preferences regarding soda, and you've assumed that those personal preferences are universal. They're not.
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What a bogus claim! Plenty of people drink artificially sweetened drinks because they don't want to enjoy a soda but not add calories to their daily consumption! Which world do you live in? Have you even been to cinema lately? I bet every other person orders a diet soda before entering the theatre. I know because I see it happen all the time all around me!
Actually show me a 10+ year study that found no surprising result.
If the fact that bunch of foundational Alzheimer's studies were found to be faked recently by a guy who profited from them for 20 years and many such cases doesn't make you more realistic then well ... you must have an exceptionally good heart :)