Conversely, diet beverages may have shown a link to stroke because of a different issue, called reverse causation. In an attempt to be healthier, people who are overweight or have diabetes may be more likely to choose diet drinks over sugary ones. Their heightened stroke risk may result from their health problems rather than their beverage choice. "We might just be measuring the residual impact of obesity and diabetes," says Dr. Rexrode.
“Big sugar” aka corn farmer conglomerates who make shitloads of money by putting HFCS in everything. They spearheaded the anti-fat craze and made sugar synonymous with healthy and fat synonymous with unhealthy. Now you have people who swear that “pure cane sugar” sodas are better for you than diet sodas, when diet sodas have proven to be one of the best things for obesity in a long, long time. What’s funnier is that low to no calorie sweeteners are some of the most studied food additives of all time; Aspartame has 60 years of study behind it, more than most prescribed medicines and just as stringent research.
Essentially, companies with lots of money to spend don’t want zero calorie sweeteners disrupting their cash cow.
I used to joke when people would say things like big sugar. Then a relative of mine did some consulting for them. The stories were insane. It really is like 1 big family/group. You'd think they were peddling diamonds.
I unfortunately know some “big” corn farmers and they will do shit like complain to their local city hall if diet sodas are allowed to be sold at the local fair or bbq cook off. I am being 100% serious. They usually get their way, too. It’s disgusting.
I think this is a huge part of the demonization of diet sodas. It's not just one company or lobbying group promoting HFCS, there are millions of Americans whose livelihood depends on having high demand for corn and corn products.
I switched to diet/zero sugar a few years ago, and felt so much better immediately, I indulge occasionally on a full sugar soda, but mostly it’s diet for me
100% nothing beats the unrestricted mouthfeel of Diet Coke after you've weaned off. Even Coke Zero feels too thick and leaves an aftertaste. Diet Coke is just cool crisp flavor while you're sipping it and then it's gone. It doesn't linger til you brush your teeth.
I did the same thing this year. I would drink sweet tea and vitamin waters instead of soda (thinking it was much better). And now switched exclusively to La Croix and Liquid death drinks with 0g and 2g sugar respectively. Within weeks felt more energy, facial puffiness decrease etc.
My family almost exclusively had diet soda, so I could never stand stand the normal stuff. I swear is coats your mouth and lingers longer than smoking a cig.
yup it sounds crazy but when you can sneak sugar into people's drinks it doesn't really reduce the amount of sugar they eat elsewhere so it's more sales for the whole industry
This. Drinking endless sugar-loaded, well, soda/energy/coffee/tea/flavored etc etc drinks is contributing massively to the epidemic of diabetes out there. Corn syrup just makes it worse.
Yes, but those companies aren’t producing HFCS. Huge agricultural businesses that grow corn are the ones making it and using their money to sway public opinion. Soda companies make what sells, and HFCS sells because of corporate funded advertising and messaging. This is just two recent examples:
In September 2008, the Corn Refiners Association[7] launched a series of United States television advertisements that stated that HFCS "is made from corn", "is natural" (changed from previously stated "doesn't have artificial ingredients"), "has the same calories as sugar or honey", "is nutritionally the same as sugar", and "is fine in moderation", in the ambition of keeping consumers from avoiding HFCS products. The ads feature actors portraying roles in upbeat domestic situations with sugary foods, with one actor disparaging a food's HFCS content but being unable to explain why, and another actor questioning the comments with these claims.
Finally, the ads each make reference to the Corn Refiners Association website.[8][failed verification]
2010 Corn Refiners Association ads feature parents walking through a corn field, talking about children's nutrition concerns and being confused by recent HFCS information. So they consulted "medical and nutrition experts" and discovered that "Whether it's corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can't tell the difference."[9]
My point was illustrating that it is not the soda companies who make HFCS and that the companies that do engage in marketing and other things to push HFCS.
Gezginci-Oktayoglu S, Ercin M, Sancar S, Celik E, Koyuturk M, Bolkent S, et al. Aspartame induces cancer stem cell enrichment through p21, NICD and GLI1 in human PANC-1 pancreas adenocarcinoma cells. Food Chem Toxicol. 2021;153:112264. doi: 10.1016/j.fct.2021.112264. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2021.112264.
pubmed
“the present study demonstrated that long-term aspartame exposure increases CSC population and tumor cell aggressiveness through p21, NICD, GLI1.”
You say that, but it’s literally the same companies. It’s not Diet Coke or Pepsi outsource the production. There’s no economic benefit for these companies to sabotage their own products
They partially or entirely own the farms and manufacture of every aspect involved in production of their products. They’re not contracting with small farmer Phil at the end of the road. It’s even toward a point that bottling plants are contractually restricted from playing any part in the assembly of competing products.
This actually came up fairly recently due Dr. Pepper found a loop whole exempting it from such stipulations.
Think about how long cigarettes didn’t get bad press? They knew it would kill you a long time ago.
But also, I believe that they aren’t selling enough regular soda to keep restaurants stocking and serving it. Practically everyone who orders soda will order diet b
You obviously don’t work in a restaurant or a place that has self-service drink fountains. Sugared drinks vastly outsell sugar-free drinks of all kinds.
They obviously dont have eyes. Any fountain drink panel has only 1-2 sugar free option. Any store has multitudes more shelf space for full sugar vs sugar free sodas. Capitalism alone tells you what is more popular
From scientific view, the effects of non-dietary sugars and sugar alcohols was not known. Now we know hell of a lot more and it is both better and worse. Some of them are not good for gut health but not very detrimental either: They are well in the "EVERYTHING IN MODERATION" group of things just like everything that tastes sweet. Insulin spike is not actually that big of a problem but insatiation is: you don't get the same "stop eating signal" than from real sugars. Body sees sugar, sends insulin, doesn't get sugar, insulin stops but hunger doesn't.
I cut my over eating of sugary things with diet soda, just drank the cheapest one, in moderation until i got bored of the same taste and there was quite natural slow decrease in the intake of sweet things. I mostly hate them, only few of them are ok, most diet colas are fine.. If there was a cola that had half and half, that would be my choice, it would negate lot of the effects on blood sugar...
Should be easy to solve by including diabetics who don't drink sugary drinks in the study. I mean didn't they do that? That would be an extremely basic thing to do surely
Probably makes some casual mention of "supplements" that can help restore your health, neglecting to disclose his own personal/financial ties to LLC making/selling them.
Controlling for all of the confounding variables regarding who consumes diet soda is the opposite of easy. It is insanely difficult, arguably impossible, and is one of the primary issues in research.
Controlling for dietary choices for an item that is a dietary choice?
People who drink diet soda typically do so as a health choice. It would be exceptional to find people that aren’t making other similar dietary choices due to being a health choice as well.
Please, you are making it seem far more difficult than it is. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Just people of a similar demographic/and comprable health status -one group of each. That would at least give a starting point for further study.
As it stands there is no point this "study". How useless is it to conclude "it's either diet-soda or their diabetes that causes them to stroke out more than normal people. That's less than worthless.
The problem is that consuming diet soda is a choice that indicates a fundamental behavioral difference between people who might otherwise appear to be in the same “group” demographically and health-wise. What other diet products might they be consuming? What lifestyle choices might they be making that are different from a regular soda drinker who is otherwise exactly as healthy and from the same socio-economic group? How could you possibly even begin to accurately adjust for these factors?
Isn’t this also a potential reason behind the “a glass of wine a day may help prevent X disease”, because people who can drink wine every day tend to be richer and thus have better health care and/or exercise more?
And the studies were showing people who drank a little had better health outcomes than people who didn't drink at all, but that's because people who were formerly heavy drinkers who had sobered up were lumped in with the teetotalers.
Also “only 97 people (3%) had strokes during the follow-up, which means only two or three of those strokes could possibly be attributed to drinking diet soda.”
Seems like too small of a sample size to say for sure.
Whenever I see "increases risk of dementia" my first thought is always that they've just flipped "makes you live longer" as a negative.
Person drinks diet drinks because they're careful with their weight and sugar intake -> person is healthier long term -> person lives to 85 and develops dementia instead of dying at 75 from a heart attack before they get the chance
If you drink coke, and are a healthy weight, you don't switch to diet coke.
If you are overweight, you would lean more towards picking diet coke.
More recent studies that take out correlation have shown that there's really nothing wrong with diet soda, and in fact studies are starting to show it's actually a moderately decent weight loss tool.
In short, it's kind of like looking at crutches, and saying "wow, we looked at people who used crutches, and SO MANY of them had ankle or knee injuries... maybe people need to avoid crutches!"
In 2007 for a meta physics class to get my philosophy degree i had to do a very long paper on reverse causation. This is the first time in almost 20 years ive encountered someone talking about it in the wild. Philosophy degree in a nutshell.
Wasn't even thinking of people who drink og soda, I was thinking of the opposite sample of non soda drinkers, and how health conscious they probably are. Diet drinkers are right in the middle.
The beverage choice of drinking diet soda actually makes the individual eat more calories than if it had regular sugar. They did some studies on fruit flies which showed that when presented artificial sweetener their brains were tricked into thinking they were getting sugar and released glucose which can causes you to act more irrationally and make poor decision making which lead people to eat more unhealthy foods. The book Hooked by Michael Moss is really good at diving into the studies and psychology of the processed food industry
"I'm Kent Brockman. On the 11:00 news tonight, a certain soft drink has been found to be lethal. We won't tell you which one until after sports and the weather with Funny Sonny Storm."
The thing that always tells me there's an agenda behind the study is when they lump a bunch of very technically different things under an umbrella name. Like diet soda, or vaping, or fried food.
Here they lump all non-sugar drinks together just "diet". Is it the new zero calorie kind, or the old school "diet". I'm not remembering which chemical is which right now but there's several ways to make a sweet 0 calorie soda. If they were legitimately studying to find an unsafe chemical, they would design the study and frame the data with those things in mind.
This is a way more complex subject than I expected before reading the comments. All I knew was the classic advice of "you'll eat more of a diet food because of the idea that it's healthier." That old cartoon Hey Arnold had an episode on it when I was little.
The headline does seem weird, since I don't really know what's in diet soda that would cause a stroke. Unless it's aspartame or something, but then why don't we just talk about artificial sweeteners?
Diet Sodas by their nature have artificial sweeteners and we simply do not have the evidence to say one way or the other that they cause health issues. On the contrary, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that diets high in sugar have substantial negative impacts on health. If you can't refrain from drinking soda then diet soda is the way to go.
That was the rational of all of the doctors at the Moffitt cancer center 25 years ago. Sugar and the corresponding calorie intake is very demonstrably bad. Artificial sweeteners could be bad, as well, but the effects are too subtle for any major studies to uncover them with sufficiently rigorous statical analysis so when weighing the pros and cons, it's better to avoid the known problem than the one that might possibly be a problem that has no conclusive evidence showing it's a problem despite being a part of Americans' diets for 50 years..
Dr Layne Norton did research at USF, where the Moffitt Center is located, and he's a powerlifting Diet Coke promoting maniac 😂 dude set world records, along with Dr Dom D'Agostino while he was doing keto research for epileptic kids, and people still don't accept that diet soda is perfectly fine. Two of the most athletic PhDs of all time, and one who competes in the most rigorously drug tested federation of all time.
We have plenty of evidence that aspartame at least don't cause a lot of things. It's one of the most heavily researched food additives. It looks like this study doesn't account for other lifestyle factors. If you drink soft drinks every day you probably also have other unhealthy habits. Also, many people drink diet sodas to lose weight so, put simply, a lot of people who are already obese drink diet sodas. Big sugar likes to fund a lot of bad research to put diet soda in a bad light.
One thing I really enjoyed about taking Medical Anthropology is that you stop using science English when you don't need to. You can say "we have proof that artificial sweeteners are fine" without needing to preface it with statements like "we don't have enough evidence to say with absolute certainty." You're basically already in the peer review process by having the conversation, so it's assumed in good faith that you are not saying something akin to "the theory of gravitation is a proven fact" and your wording is your interpretation of the data, not a quotation of a citation or datum.
I feel like it’s always a little telling when they chose to use 300% rather than just saying 3 times… it sounds way scarier when you use a bigger number. Like the reverse of every price ending in .99 to appear less.
I have family on both sides who've had strokes, I already suffer from neuralgia and ice pick headaches, haven't been to the doctor in decades, and if we look at my wife's familial history, she'll be lucky to make it to 70
Gotta die somehow, hand me a diet pepsi
(Fr though I've drank soda lifelong, the caffeine really doesn't affect me, and despite my body trying to make me stop by giving me artificial sweetener aftertaste for days, it's a hard addiction to kick)
The article is horribly written. It's mostly quotes from a doctor who published something [still unclear what, exactly, as the paper isn't cited] about the topic, and relates his thoughts on longitudinal studies about the same topic. Headline is click-baity, too. Pass.
Let it be doomed. We already don’t have healthcare. Just sick care(in the US) that costs tons of money only after you’ve already forked out tons of money for the health insurance.
I think letting people die is generally a bad thing. I think our healthcare system sucks, but I think reform is better than just letting people die lol.
The article doesn't clarify whether the 300% is absolute or relative change (because it's clickbait) and the link that supposedly goes to the original study...doesn't, but I'd bet a lot that it's the relative change (the percentage difference from the original number) not the actual absolute change. Meaning, a 300% relative change might actually just mean that your absolute risk goes from 1% to 3%, or something similar.
When dr told me I was prediabetic I switched from reg cola to diet. Was drinking .5L or more per day. Next visit 3 months later he was amazed and asked how I lost 32kg. I told him only change was diet vs reg cola. He couldn’t believe it. Have since plateaued at same wt, need to find next big swap that will improve wt.
I really want to know who they did this study on, I mean if they're all very unhealthy, their stroke risk is already high compared to others. Reminds me of some studies where they tested asparthame and it was like 5x the dose in a day that a human would ingest in a week...
80 years of that shit should have killed him already. HOW IS HE NOT DEAD YET?! how does someone with that lifestyle go full speed into death from Alzheimers, but beats his own dad's record anyway? it's maddening. which explains why I am starting to believe he is some kind of ultra healthy uber mensch.
Per at least one study, 11% of healthy-weight, 19% of overweight, and 22% of obese adults drink diet beverages. Obesity is linked heavily to both stroke and dementia. Diet soda is linked to additional weight gain.
An 8 year study showed faster cognitive decline for no/low calorie beverage drinkers, and the fastest decline among those no/low calorie beverage drinkers with diabetes.
A lot of science has basically been screaming "One of the worst things a person who is overweight can do is drink a diet soda" pretty consistantly.
The study you linked to support your claim that diet sodas are linked to weight gain says that fat people who drink diet soda eat more solid food than fat people who drink sugary beverages -- 88 calories worth for overweight people and 194 for obese people. So like, 1-2 sodas worth.
It also says total caloric intake was still higher among people who drink sugary beverages, though only significantly so for healthy weight folks.
What its actually saying is that drinking diet soda is unlikely to cause you to eat significantly less because youll just find the calories elsewhere.
And how do these studies compare to the overall buddy of research on the subject? It is easy to cherry coke pick a few studies. Which is what tends to happen when you reach your conclusion first and hit Google second....
"Liar" is a literal description of what you did though.
This isn't about diet soda, it's about this thing people do where they try to make a point by shotgunning a bunch of links at you that don't say what they claim the links will say with full confidence no one will read them. It degrades discourse and makes society worse.
I'm not committed to illiteracy I'm committed to honest discourse.
I don't think it's diet beverages causing weight gain, it's eating more food. I could believe that people who are overweight are more likely to drink diet soda, but then subconsciously think that means they've been 'good' and can eat more other foods.
I would bet that normal weight people drink less diet AND less regular soda than overweight or obese people.
Diet soda is kind of like a patch for smokers. It's a bridge to drinking no or very little soda.
Conversely, diet beverages may have shown a link to stroke because of a different issue, called reverse causation. In an attempt to be healthier, people who are overweight or have diabetes may be more likely to choose diet drinks over sugary ones. Their heightened stroke risk may result from their health problems rather than their beverage choice. "We might just be measuring the residual impact of obesity and diabetes," says Dr. Rexrode.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/drinking-diet-soda-raise-risk-stroke-2017073112109
From a historiographical view, Im wondering why the media has always had it out for diet soda..?
“Big sugar” aka corn farmer conglomerates who make shitloads of money by putting HFCS in everything. They spearheaded the anti-fat craze and made sugar synonymous with healthy and fat synonymous with unhealthy. Now you have people who swear that “pure cane sugar” sodas are better for you than diet sodas, when diet sodas have proven to be one of the best things for obesity in a long, long time. What’s funnier is that low to no calorie sweeteners are some of the most studied food additives of all time; Aspartame has 60 years of study behind it, more than most prescribed medicines and just as stringent research.
Essentially, companies with lots of money to spend don’t want zero calorie sweeteners disrupting their cash cow.
I used to joke when people would say things like big sugar. Then a relative of mine did some consulting for them. The stories were insane. It really is like 1 big family/group. You'd think they were peddling diamonds.
Goes back hundreds of years too. Wars have been fought and people enslaved over sugar.
I unfortunately know some “big” corn farmers and they will do shit like complain to their local city hall if diet sodas are allowed to be sold at the local fair or bbq cook off. I am being 100% serious. They usually get their way, too. It’s disgusting.
I think this is a huge part of the demonization of diet sodas. It's not just one company or lobbying group promoting HFCS, there are millions of Americans whose livelihood depends on having high demand for corn and corn products.
but what of my grandpapa who toiled the live long day in the Phelps Dodge Zero aspartame mines
Considering how addictive sweet stuff is in general, they may as well be.
I switched to diet/zero sugar a few years ago, and felt so much better immediately, I indulge occasionally on a full sugar soda, but mostly it’s diet for me
I've been drinking diet/zero sugar sodas for so long full-sugar ones taste too sweet, and the "texture" is different, kind of feels thicker I guess?
100% nothing beats the unrestricted mouthfeel of Diet Coke after you've weaned off. Even Coke Zero feels too thick and leaves an aftertaste. Diet Coke is just cool crisp flavor while you're sipping it and then it's gone. It doesn't linger til you brush your teeth.
I did the same thing this year. I would drink sweet tea and vitamin waters instead of soda (thinking it was much better). And now switched exclusively to La Croix and Liquid death drinks with 0g and 2g sugar respectively. Within weeks felt more energy, facial puffiness decrease etc.
My family almost exclusively had diet soda, so I could never stand stand the normal stuff. I swear is coats your mouth and lingers longer than smoking a cig.
yup it sounds crazy but when you can sneak sugar into people's drinks it doesn't really reduce the amount of sugar they eat elsewhere so it's more sales for the whole industry
This. Drinking endless sugar-loaded, well, soda/energy/coffee/tea/flavored etc etc drinks is contributing massively to the epidemic of diabetes out there. Corn syrup just makes it worse.
Ding ding
I mean I get why that would be a conspiracy, but the same companies that make diet soda make regular soda too.
Yes, but those companies aren’t producing HFCS. Huge agricultural businesses that grow corn are the ones making it and using their money to sway public opinion. Soda companies make what sells, and HFCS sells because of corporate funded advertising and messaging. This is just two recent examples:
Nothing you said highlights why they’re against Diet soda.
My point was illustrating that it is not the soda companies who make HFCS and that the companies that do engage in marketing and other things to push HFCS.
High fructose corn syrup and aspartame both are damn gross! 🤮
Gezginci-Oktayoglu S, Ercin M, Sancar S, Celik E, Koyuturk M, Bolkent S, et al. Aspartame induces cancer stem cell enrichment through p21, NICD and GLI1 in human PANC-1 pancreas adenocarcinoma cells. Food Chem Toxicol. 2021;153:112264. doi: 10.1016/j.fct.2021.112264. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2021.112264. pubmed
“the present study demonstrated that long-term aspartame exposure increases CSC population and tumor cell aggressiveness through p21, NICD, GLI1.”
You say that, but it’s literally the same companies. It’s not Diet Coke or Pepsi outsource the production. There’s no economic benefit for these companies to sabotage their own products
Pepsi and Coca Cola don’t manufacture HFCS
They partially or entirely own the farms and manufacture of every aspect involved in production of their products. They’re not contracting with small farmer Phil at the end of the road. It’s even toward a point that bottling plants are contractually restricted from playing any part in the assembly of competing products.
This actually came up fairly recently due Dr. Pepper found a loop whole exempting it from such stipulations.
Can you provide a link? It seems like you just misunderstand supply chains.
Think about how long cigarettes didn’t get bad press? They knew it would kill you a long time ago.
But also, I believe that they aren’t selling enough regular soda to keep restaurants stocking and serving it. Practically everyone who orders soda will order diet b
I chose to believe this statement was interrupted by a hit carried out by "big sugar"
r/redditsniper
You obviously don’t work in a restaurant or a place that has self-service drink fountains. Sugared drinks vastly outsell sugar-free drinks of all kinds.
They obviously dont have eyes. Any fountain drink panel has only 1-2 sugar free option. Any store has multitudes more shelf space for full sugar vs sugar free sodas. Capitalism alone tells you what is more popular
That's just not true. It's not true by a HUGE amount. Diet sodas aren't anywhere near as popular.
Well i drink diet drinks,run,am healthy and had a stroke.
From scientific view, the effects of non-dietary sugars and sugar alcohols was not known. Now we know hell of a lot more and it is both better and worse. Some of them are not good for gut health but not very detrimental either: They are well in the "EVERYTHING IN MODERATION" group of things just like everything that tastes sweet. Insulin spike is not actually that big of a problem but insatiation is: you don't get the same "stop eating signal" than from real sugars. Body sees sugar, sends insulin, doesn't get sugar, insulin stops but hunger doesn't.
I cut my over eating of sugary things with diet soda, just drank the cheapest one, in moderation until i got bored of the same taste and there was quite natural slow decrease in the intake of sweet things. I mostly hate them, only few of them are ok, most diet colas are fine.. If there was a cola that had half and half, that would be my choice, it would negate lot of the effects on blood sugar...
Most studies into health outcomes basically boil down to: exercise and don't be fat.
Should be easy to solve by including diabetics who don't drink sugary drinks in the study. I mean didn't they do that? That would be an extremely basic thing to do surely
This article cites no sources because it is based solely on one person’s opinion. Think RFK Jr. This is just clickbait with no science behind it.
The dude they cited, Clint Steele, isn't even a medical doctor. He's a chiropractor quack.
Probably makes some casual mention of "supplements" that can help restore your health, neglecting to disclose his own personal/financial ties to LLC making/selling them.
AG-1, now in a convenient two liter diet soda formula! Approved by 9 out of 10 health guru podcasters, and available at fine stores everywhere!
Controlling for all of the confounding variables regarding who consumes diet soda is the opposite of easy. It is insanely difficult, arguably impossible, and is one of the primary issues in research.
Dietary choices is a strong confounding variable.
Controlling for dietary choices for an item that is a dietary choice?
People who drink diet soda typically do so as a health choice. It would be exceptional to find people that aren’t making other similar dietary choices due to being a health choice as well.
Please, you are making it seem far more difficult than it is. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Just people of a similar demographic/and comprable health status -one group of each. That would at least give a starting point for further study.
As it stands there is no point this "study". How useless is it to conclude "it's either diet-soda or their diabetes that causes them to stroke out more than normal people. That's less than worthless.
The problem is that consuming diet soda is a choice that indicates a fundamental behavioral difference between people who might otherwise appear to be in the same “group” demographically and health-wise. What other diet products might they be consuming? What lifestyle choices might they be making that are different from a regular soda drinker who is otherwise exactly as healthy and from the same socio-economic group? How could you possibly even begin to accurately adjust for these factors?
Isn’t this also a potential reason behind the “a glass of wine a day may help prevent X disease”, because people who can drink wine every day tend to be richer and thus have better health care and/or exercise more?
And the studies were showing people who drank a little had better health outcomes than people who didn't drink at all, but that's because people who were formerly heavy drinkers who had sobered up were lumped in with the teetotalers.
That and the alcohol industry paid off scientists to say that red wine is good for heart disease just like the tobacco industry did
Came here to say its correlation not causation. I'm glad someone beat me to it
Also “only 97 people (3%) had strokes during the follow-up, which means only two or three of those strokes could possibly be attributed to drinking diet soda.”
Seems like too small of a sample size to say for sure.
Was coming to say this exact thing. But with less citations.
Surely you’d think they’d control for this /s
Seems like these are variables that can be adjusted for in a model.
Whenever I see "increases risk of dementia" my first thought is always that they've just flipped "makes you live longer" as a negative.
Person drinks diet drinks because they're careful with their weight and sugar intake -> person is healthier long term -> person lives to 85 and develops dementia instead of dying at 75 from a heart attack before they get the chance
Exactly.
If you drink coke, and are a healthy weight, you don't switch to diet coke.
If you are overweight, you would lean more towards picking diet coke.
More recent studies that take out correlation have shown that there's really nothing wrong with diet soda, and in fact studies are starting to show it's actually a moderately decent weight loss tool.
In short, it's kind of like looking at crutches, and saying "wow, we looked at people who used crutches, and SO MANY of them had ankle or knee injuries... maybe people need to avoid crutches!"
In 2007 for a meta physics class to get my philosophy degree i had to do a very long paper on reverse causation. This is the first time in almost 20 years ive encountered someone talking about it in the wild. Philosophy degree in a nutshell.
Correlation not causation!
Wasn't even thinking of people who drink og soda, I was thinking of the opposite sample of non soda drinkers, and how health conscious they probably are. Diet drinkers are right in the middle.
The beverage choice of drinking diet soda actually makes the individual eat more calories than if it had regular sugar. They did some studies on fruit flies which showed that when presented artificial sweetener their brains were tricked into thinking they were getting sugar and released glucose which can causes you to act more irrationally and make poor decision making which lead people to eat more unhealthy foods. The book Hooked by Michael Moss is really good at diving into the studies and psychology of the processed food industry
Why would your body release glucose if it thinks it's getting sugar? Glucose is sugar.
And what if you had a non-artificial sweetener? Wouldn't your body also release "glucose"?
So what would be the difference?
This is why I always go full sugar, never go full retaspartame.
"I'm Kent Brockman. On the 11:00 news tonight, a certain soft drink has been found to be lethal. We won't tell you which one until after sports and the weather with Funny Sonny Storm."
The thing that always tells me there's an agenda behind the study is when they lump a bunch of very technically different things under an umbrella name. Like diet soda, or vaping, or fried food.
Here they lump all non-sugar drinks together just "diet". Is it the new zero calorie kind, or the old school "diet". I'm not remembering which chemical is which right now but there's several ways to make a sweet 0 calorie soda. If they were legitimately studying to find an unsafe chemical, they would design the study and frame the data with those things in mind.
Phew. I was worried it was alcohol. Well, excuse me while I get back to drinking alcohol
There’s already a known and well-studied increase in stroke risk from alcohol though.
There in lies the humor, Kurt! These clickbait articles are always pointing to alcohol.
This is a way more complex subject than I expected before reading the comments. All I knew was the classic advice of "you'll eat more of a diet food because of the idea that it's healthier." That old cartoon Hey Arnold had an episode on it when I was little.
The headline does seem weird, since I don't really know what's in diet soda that would cause a stroke. Unless it's aspartame or something, but then why don't we just talk about artificial sweeteners?
Diet Sodas by their nature have artificial sweeteners and we simply do not have the evidence to say one way or the other that they cause health issues. On the contrary, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that diets high in sugar have substantial negative impacts on health. If you can't refrain from drinking soda then diet soda is the way to go.
That was the rational of all of the doctors at the Moffitt cancer center 25 years ago. Sugar and the corresponding calorie intake is very demonstrably bad. Artificial sweeteners could be bad, as well, but the effects are too subtle for any major studies to uncover them with sufficiently rigorous statical analysis so when weighing the pros and cons, it's better to avoid the known problem than the one that might possibly be a problem that has no conclusive evidence showing it's a problem despite being a part of Americans' diets for 50 years..
Dr Layne Norton did research at USF, where the Moffitt Center is located, and he's a powerlifting Diet Coke promoting maniac 😂 dude set world records, along with Dr Dom D'Agostino while he was doing keto research for epileptic kids, and people still don't accept that diet soda is perfectly fine. Two of the most athletic PhDs of all time, and one who competes in the most rigorously drug tested federation of all time.
There have also been three major artificial sweeteners; what are the chances that these three very different sweeteners are all causing this issue?
We have plenty of evidence that aspartame at least don't cause a lot of things. It's one of the most heavily researched food additives. It looks like this study doesn't account for other lifestyle factors. If you drink soft drinks every day you probably also have other unhealthy habits. Also, many people drink diet sodas to lose weight so, put simply, a lot of people who are already obese drink diet sodas. Big sugar likes to fund a lot of bad research to put diet soda in a bad light.
One thing I really enjoyed about taking Medical Anthropology is that you stop using science English when you don't need to. You can say "we have proof that artificial sweeteners are fine" without needing to preface it with statements like "we don't have enough evidence to say with absolute certainty." You're basically already in the peer review process by having the conversation, so it's assumed in good faith that you are not saying something akin to "the theory of gravitation is a proven fact" and your wording is your interpretation of the data, not a quotation of a citation or datum.
So we have a means of testing this: a prospective, randomized, double-blind trial with enough participants to generate appropriate statistical power.
It will be unethical. Can’t trial an intervention with possible risk and no expected benefit. Same reason there are no RCT’s of smoking.
The expected benefit would be theoretical weight loss or at least non-progression of weight gain.
That would be compared to soda with sugar. Is it supposed to increase stroke risk compared to regular soda or to no soda?
We would presume that people who drink diet soda do so because they want to avoid the calories that regular soda would have.
It is called ‘harm reduction ‘ for a reason.
Furthermore, if you normally have a likelihood of one in a million, and it increases to four in a million, it is s 300% increase….
They never explain in the article which specific "chemicals" in diet soda are causing these effects or why.
Right, because any study on the sweetener shows it’s safe lol
I drink Diet Coke every day, not dead yet doctor.
BUT..did you know that simply being alive increases your stroke to “maybe”?
How would you code this advise on the bill? Also why is it $350?
That's true. They say the biggest risk factor of stroke is having a brain.
I’ve been drinking green tea all goddamn day!
Yeah I go to church every Sunday. You gonna bring the demons out of me?!
This is my hat now! Totally my hat.
[looks at wrist watch]
How about now? U there?
That’s why you have a stroke once a day to balance it out
I feel like it’s always a little telling when they chose to use 300% rather than just saying 3 times… it sounds way scarier when you use a bigger number. Like the reverse of every price ending in .99 to appear less.
I have family on both sides who've had strokes, I already suffer from neuralgia and ice pick headaches, haven't been to the doctor in decades, and if we look at my wife's familial history, she'll be lucky to make it to 70
Gotta die somehow, hand me a diet pepsi
(Fr though I've drank soda lifelong, the caffeine really doesn't affect me, and despite my body trying to make me stop by giving me artificial sweetener aftertaste for days, it's a hard addiction to kick)
We literally can't have anything nice
Regular soda is bad. Diet soda is bad. Coffee is bad. Everything is bad.
Don't take a medical article from a chiropractor as science.
Regular soda is way worse for you than diet soda.
Water is the only thing that is good.
Guess again, it’s chock-full of microplastics and forever chemicals.
And too much water can kill you. Look up water poisoning
I was in the Air Force before I know all about hyponatremia
lets give Trump a bigger button
The doctor doing the warning is a chiropractor.
Good thing I only drink water and beer, then.
I only drink rainwater and grain alcohol. Peace on earth, purity of essence
You are missing black coffee to complete the holy trinity.
Eh, caffeine pills are cheaper.
Call northernlion hes in shambles
lol
The article has a link that it says goes to the research he's referring to, but it actually goes to a news paper article about something else
The article is horribly written. It's mostly quotes from a doctor who published something [still unclear what, exactly, as the paper isn't cited] about the topic, and relates his thoughts on longitudinal studies about the same topic. Headline is click-baity, too. Pass.
Doctors drink so much diet coke. It's a meme. If it does cause strokes the healthcare system is doomed.
Let it be doomed. We already don’t have healthcare. Just sick care(in the US) that costs tons of money only after you’ve already forked out tons of money for the health insurance.
I think letting people die is generally a bad thing. I think our healthcare system sucks, but I think reform is better than just letting people die lol.
yea i didnt really mean it THAT way lol.
Keep drinking it Donald, keep drinking it.
The article doesn't clarify whether the 300% is absolute or relative change (because it's clickbait) and the link that supposedly goes to the original study...doesn't, but I'd bet a lot that it's the relative change (the percentage difference from the original number) not the actual absolute change. Meaning, a 300% relative change might actually just mean that your absolute risk goes from 1% to 3%, or something similar.
So Im either fat, or about to have a stroke. Damn
When dr told me I was prediabetic I switched from reg cola to diet. Was drinking .5L or more per day. Next visit 3 months later he was amazed and asked how I lost 32kg. I told him only change was diet vs reg cola. He couldn’t believe it. Have since plateaued at same wt, need to find next big swap that will improve wt.
I tell my patients, you can choose sugar water or chemical water. Or, you could just drink water out of the tap.
Doesn’t our president drink crates of Diet Coke every day? He was always yelling about needing one with every meal.
I really want to know who they did this study on, I mean if they're all very unhealthy, their stroke risk is already high compared to others. Reminds me of some studies where they tested asparthame and it was like 5x the dose in a day that a human would ingest in a week...
Wow, I’m glad I only drink the zero sugar sodas and not the diet ones now!
Trump might be the healthiest person in the history of mankind after all.
Give the artificial sweeteners some time, they’re more of a sleeper hit.
80 years of that shit should have killed him already. HOW IS HE NOT DEAD YET?! how does someone with that lifestyle go full speed into death from Alzheimers, but beats his own dad's record anyway? it's maddening. which explains why I am starting to believe he is some kind of ultra healthy uber mensch.
More of a blubber mensch, really.
He’s powered by Adderall and avarice.
The stimulants run the body, while the evil within keeps him alive.
darkest timeline, seriously.
Fuck.
My boss drinks 3-4 at least during the workday.
Plus one on the way home.
Source: I’m his boss.
My grandma with disbetes always drank real coke because diet was bullshit
Just a heads up that that appears to be a very unfortunate typo. Not that there’s anything wrong with it
What about people who drink regular cola on a daily basis
Per at least one study, 11% of healthy-weight, 19% of overweight, and 22% of obese adults drink diet beverages. Obesity is linked heavily to both stroke and dementia. Diet soda is linked to additional weight gain.
An 8 year study showed faster cognitive decline for no/low calorie beverage drinkers, and the fastest decline among those no/low calorie beverage drinkers with diabetes.
A lot of science has basically been screaming "One of the worst things a person who is overweight can do is drink a diet soda" pretty consistantly.
Edit: a couple others
The study you linked to support your claim that diet sodas are linked to weight gain says that fat people who drink diet soda eat more solid food than fat people who drink sugary beverages -- 88 calories worth for overweight people and 194 for obese people. So like, 1-2 sodas worth.
It also says total caloric intake was still higher among people who drink sugary beverages, though only significantly so for healthy weight folks.
What its actually saying is that drinking diet soda is unlikely to cause you to eat significantly less because youll just find the calories elsewhere.
It says nothing about weight gain whatsoever.
That's absolutely fair; here are a couple others:
And how do these studies compare to the overall buddy of research on the subject? It is easy to cherry coke pick a few studies. Which is what tends to happen when you reach your conclusion first and hit Google second....
No thanks. I already know you're a liar and I dont want to do your homework assignments :)
The fuck in the defense of diet soda is this aggression?
Lmao using the word "liar" here is an amazing decision to go full drama, but I respect the commitment to illiteracy.
"Liar" is a literal description of what you did though.
This isn't about diet soda, it's about this thing people do where they try to make a point by shotgunning a bunch of links at you that don't say what they claim the links will say with full confidence no one will read them. It degrades discourse and makes society worse.
I'm not committed to illiteracy I'm committed to honest discourse.
I don't think it's diet beverages causing weight gain, it's eating more food. I could believe that people who are overweight are more likely to drink diet soda, but then subconsciously think that means they've been 'good' and can eat more other foods.
I would bet that normal weight people drink less diet AND less regular soda than overweight or obese people.
Diet soda is kind of like a patch for smokers. It's a bridge to drinking no or very little soda.
That makes me so happy that my body violently disagrees with one of the ingredients in diet sodas.
NorthernLion is up right now