Diet Drinks are not killing you
medium.com
medium.com
That said, the fact that this study doesn't prove a significant connection between diet soda and these diseases, doesn't mean there isn't one. It's really hard to prove a negative. The best we can do is keep looking for a negative impact -- the longer we look and don't find one, the more likely that there isn't one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
> FDA officials describe aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut."
- World Health Organisation
- US FDA
- British Food Standards Agency
- European Food Safety Authority
- Health Canada
- Australia and New Zealand Food Standards Authority
- And a whole bunch of peer reviewed, double-blind RCTs
Although, I should disclose that the Aspartame Illuminati pay me a commission whenever I make a positive mention of the additive :)
I don't know. What leads you to think that?
That may be true, but his telling people "They are safe" is not proven true and "Drink away" is just piling stupid on top of a lie.
What part of the article said that?
The study in question was well designed, with a large population. Study participants, randomly assigned to one of three groups, drank either diet soda exclusively, regular soda exclusively, or water. Participants were followed for 60 years, and all major major illnesses and deaths were carefully recorded. After 60 years, the three groups were found to have identical outcomes, which allowed the FDA to approve aspertame for general consumption.
On a related note... Science has led to many amazing things, but that doesn't mean it can realistically answer all questions. I think we should remember to be a bit humble and honest about which questions can be answered scientifically and which can't. Unfortunately, individual researchers and journalists both have incentives to make the most out of any result.
Careful, this attitude is essentially perpetuating that we should only use evidence when we feel like it.
If you refuse to consume something because you think it is detrimental to health but there is no evidence supporting it, just be honest and admit that it's a religious belief.
I agree that mouse studies can show that megadoses of these sugar substitutes aren't lethal and probably won't cause cancer. But humans aren't mice and we don't live in lab cages, so animal studies don't answer the question I'm really interested in (~"will accepting artificial sweeteners into my diet improve my health?"). What would be the right experiment to answer that question? Has that experiment actually been performed, and would it be practical? Changes in human behavior might be hard to observe and quantify, and there are always practical limits to sample sizes.
Sometimes it's very, very hard to design a study that actually answers the question you're interested in, but neither the scientists nor anyone else really has an incentive to be humble about that. (Most scientists want to make their work seem impactful.)
That's not to be dismissive or meant to deny what we do know, only that it's wise to be humble and keep looking and learning.
But it doesn't. Science doesn't 'prove' anything, it provides evidence for hypotheses. And there is much more evidence for the hypothesis that diet soda is safe for human consumption than otherwise. It would take a lot of work to upend this, and so far, nothing really substantial has been done.
I've wondered about that myself. After dieting for a while and getting pretty good at it, I've noticed that my body absolutely seems to be able to detect the difference between actual carbs/sweets and the artificial ones. At least, I will start craving an energy bar with actual sugar in it as opposed to a protein bar that tastes sweet but is just full of artificial sweeteners.
So I don't drink them out of concern for hyperinsulinemia, insulin resistance in the cells (DMT2) and related endocrine issues.
Please note that there are NO STUDIES of this as far as I know: my choice not to drink them is entirely based on first principles and the easy fact that it's not hard to avoid them. I am not a fan of crazy health fads ("Hey kids, let's wash out those ol' bags of toxins with a juice cleanse") but like I said there's basically no downside to avoiding those drinks anyway.
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/146/12/2544.short
Sugar-Sweetened Beverage but Not Diet Soda Consumption Is Positively Associated with Progression of Insulin Resistance and Prediabetes
From the footnotes on the link given:
- Supported by the NIH/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Framingham Heart Study (contract N01-HC-25195), the Boston University School of Medicine, and the USDA (USDA agreement 58-1950-0-014
- Author disclosures: J Ma, PF Jacques, JB Meigs, CS Fox, GT Rogers, CE Smith, A Hruby, E Saltzman, and NM McKeown, no conflicts of interest
Why? To me, that's what science IS. Providing the ability to answer any and all questions about our nature.
Sorry but you are putting a lipstick on a pig.
"that's what science IS. Providing the ability to answer any and all questions about our nature."
What do you mean by this?
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20130710/could-artifi...
"After a while, Swithers said, it's like the mouth keeps crying wolf, and the brain and gut stop listening. As a result, when real sugar and real calories come along, the body doesn't respond to them as strongly as it normally might. Calories don't end up making you feel as full as they should. They aren't as rewarding. So you don't get the signals that might stop you from eating when you should."
> Artificial sweeteners can boost appetite by activating hunger pathways in the body, scientists have found in animals.
> In fruit flies and mice, the mismatch between sweet taste and fewer calories sends the body into "feed me" mode, the journal Cell Metabolism reports. But UK nutritionists say this does not mean the same is true in humans.
Perhaps next you'll suggest that large clothes are causing obesity.
(...)
Dr Hamid Farshchi, from The University of Nottingham’s School of Life Sciences, said: “Our results are very interesting. They show that the women drinking water after their main meal at lunch time over 24 weeks lost on average 1.16kg more than the women who drank diet drinks after their meal. We think that by drinking water instead of sweet-tasting diet drinks, the women may be adhering better to the weight loss diet because artificial sweeteners may increase desire for sweetened and more energy dense foods.
Source https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2016/october...
Want to drink soy sludge and live forever? Have I got a site for you! Looking to skip breakfast and lunch in the name of science, here you go! Eat no meat? Eat all meat? Both work!
> The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches. Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.
"Everybody should eat X."
"Y is making you Z."
where the whole of the population is treated as one.
Yet, we are different. Our metabolic balances differ. Some persons lack certain genes needed to process certain substances. Other persons are super efficient at that and need more of some substances.
"One size fits all." does not work in nutrition!
But doesn't that imply a correlation. Eteeen diet drinks and diabetes? So maybe diet drinks don't cause dementia, but they do lead to diabetes, which then increases the odds of dementia. How do you conclude "drink away" from that?
That would also fit other studies that have shown that drinking diet soda instead of sugar soda leads to no weight loss, likely because people compensate by getting their sugars elsewhere. Which would match well with the idea that diet soda consumption correlates with diabetes.
Let's assume a population that lives on an island that sits on the equator. One side of the island is polluted with radiation. It also features a kind of purple fruit that doesn't grow anywhere else and is not exported.
Now let's assume that the fruit contains a cumulative toxin that causes people to die very young of brain cancer.
A study without adequate controls might conclude:
-- Living near the equator causes brain cancer -- living on this island causes brain cancer -- radiation causes brain cancer -- eating purple fruit causes brain cancer -- radiation causes people to eat more purple fruit
Only one of these is true, but one could certainly invent reasons to explain nearly all of these correlations as causal.
In the case of this study, an alternate explanation that makes sense is: -- diabetes causes dementia -- diabetics are strongly encouraged to drink sugar-free soda to avoid sugar intake -- therefore, diet soda intake and dementia are linked only through their common root cause, diabetes
Questioning the research is great, and pointing out that they used a scatter gun approach is totally valid, but I feel like the author lost a lot of position when they said:
"There’s only one small snag in this story; it isn’t true. Diet drinks aren’t that bad for you at all."
That's completely unsubstantiated. You've pointed out some potential problems, but not brought it home.
Until there is some proof of that, it's safe to say that there is no evidence that diet drinks cause bad effects.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
It's stuff like this which makes me wonder if we really need the media in its current form. I'm inclined to say no and that's why I have no qualms about using an ad blocker. Maybe society would be better off if we just funded whatever shreds of that dinosaur industry are still valuable directly -- Glenn Greenwald could surely make a fine living with a Patreon account. Outside of very specific cases I would prefer my media outlet to be an aggregator of primary sources, perhaps with summaries. I do not want the mainstream press to publish any more bad science articles.
drink water. trust me, i get it, sugar is good. but really, just drink water. your health will thank me.
What can I do? force myself to avoid all of that? perhaps. I've tried but I always go back to flavored drinks.
To paraphrase - Processed Crap Is Killing You.