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Applying population results to an individual is the parallel fallacy to applying individual results to a population.

While the net effect on you may not be significant, you have to decide if you want to consume something that does not demonstrate heal benefits.

You're correct.

It could actually be having an effect and I could just not be noticing it because there are many other variables in play.

I suppose my comment was inspired by seeing posts about soda and weight gain and seeing comments of anecdotal evidence for people who have cut out diet soda and notice their weight dropping significantly.

I merely wanted to provide an anecdotal data point (however useless scientifically it may be) to try and give a perspective from the other side of things.

Anecdotes are stories, not data points. 100 stories don't become 100 data points.

ok, but nobody was arguing that they are data points?

The parent was literally saying that he wanted to convey a different story to the ones commonly heard, in order to give a more balanced picture. Nowhere does that suggest anything about data points, just people sharing stories with different view points.

It's good to have a reminder that "anecdata" != real data every now and then, but in cases where you have a poster clearly acknowledging all that, bringing this up seems like little more than an out of place trope.

You can eat bacon, drink whiskey, and smoke every day of your life, and live past 90. You might also die by 55. Roll them dice...

It's also possible to run marathons, do spinning + yoga classes, eat only raw vegan foods, and die in a car crash. I personally aim for a balance which prioritizes personal enjoyment over absolute longevity-seeking. I don't want to live to be >120, but I also really don't want to spend the 2nd 50% of my life unable to participate in relatively demanding physical activities, like kiteboarding / surfing / mountain biking / >10 mile hikes. I like coffee and tea, and I stay away from soda (diet or otherwise), almost anything with artificial sweeteners, fast food, potato chips, burgers, most things sold at 7-11, more than 2 drinks in a night, etc.

If 1L of diet soda per day in your diet is making you worry then your diet is probably pretty healthy overall.

That's less than 3 cans. Have a look at what 7/11 sells as a single serving.

Rephrasing it as 3 cans of soda doesn't make it sound good. 3 cans a day is quite a bit. It might be healthy (or not), but I'm pretty sure 1000 cans/year is well above average for the typical western nation.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Soda drinkers I've met who are really into it tend to go through a few 12-packs a week. As a kid, I'd play Quake with a 2L of Cherry Coke each night, and I've known others who did the same with Mountain Dew. Live and learn, I suppose.

http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-s... says 41 gallons per capita in 2014. Converted, it's 0.4252 liters per day, so a liter per day is more than double the average.

I wonder what the difference is between mean and median in this case?

The standard deviation must be pretty high. There are lot people who drink almost no soda.

That's per capita; not everyone drinks soda. A liter per day could certainly be the average for soda drinkers.

Well, I specifically called out typical western nations and not just the US. I see a lot of soda drinking in the US and never saw very much in Europe. I don't think American soda consumption is actually typical (or healthy).

I assume you mean "weight gain linked to diet soda" and I think the main thing is that it's still inconclusive. As much faith as we may have in science, I think in terms of dietary studies, most of them have not been able to control a bunch of outside variables. And the food industry also has a shitton of marketing noise to confuse the general populace.

Whenever these `weight gain linked to soda` studies come up, I'm always confused.

That seems like the goal, doesn't it?

If sugar is singled as the cause of obesity, the next step will be taxing sugar and not diet sodas. So expect a thick smokescreen around soda. The fact that overhelming difference between beverages with a huge sugar dosage and without doesn't appear in a study is suspicious enough.

While I'm in nowhere near as good shape as you, I have similar 'anecdata' findings.

I spent the last few months this year testing this, partly because I was curious about the Tim Ferriss claim that Diet Coke causes you to gain weight. (I actually wanted to test if I could lose weight just from walking & no diet changes.) Even with my two cans of Coke Zero a day, plus sparkling water with ice and a frappuccino most days, I've been losing weight for 4 months. (20.5% bf down to 16.5%.) I did add exercise, but only walking - I increased my steps up to 16000 steps a day for a while, but I'm back to sub-10000/day now. (Pebble Health has been awesome on my Pebble Time Steel.)

Whatever effect carbonated beverages have, at least in my experience, it's easily countered by exercise. Maybe that's not true for everyone, but it seems it's something you can easily test on yourself for a month or two to make your own conclusions.

The study says that carbonation makes you more hungry, but you don't necessarily have to respond to that hunger.

wow 16k/day is a lot. i walk home from work every day, that walk is just over 2 miles and I still only log in about 9k steps (iphone)

Yup, at that point I was doing 2 - 2.5 hrs walking a day, though some of it was adding extra steps during my usual day, eg walking a half-mile lap around the shopping mall before going to the cafe. I was able to do it because I'm freelance / flexible hours, and I was determined to complete my experiment.

The usual knock on diet sodas (actually artificial sweeteners in general) is that it wreaks havoc on the gut bacteria, which could have all sorts of adverse effects. Not sure how much evidence of this there is, but weight gain is not the only thing to be on the lookout for.

That makes more sense to me. I imagine one possible side-effect of gut bacteria imbalance could be weight loss for some people, that the side-effects differ for different people.

> I've been told I'm in fantastic shape (>90% in all http://strengthlevel.com/ measurements and under 10% body fat) at the moment

Sweet humble brag but considering

> As a side note, my metabolism is actually slower than average and I need to eat on average ~10% calories less than any macronutrient calculator says to stay in the shape (low bf + strong) that I enjoy being in.

You're either a genetic freak or full of it. 90% on all major lifts puts you in the category of amateur competition champion. Go back and run your numbers again, and this time be honest. You're not "strong" at those numbers. You're elite. Which less than 5% of the population fits into. Those kind of people don't browse hacker news. They model for M&F and train for the olympics.

Bodies are complicated I completely agree with you here. I have an extremely bad habit drinking about 2L of diet soda a day (on a good day). I also exercise 4-5 days a week (powerlifting and some light cardio) and am in great shape.

people who read these studies and change their habits to drinking less diet soda, hoping they lose weight, are missing the forest and seeing trees. It's a healthy improvement, but not going to impact their life significantly.

I'm surprised you didn't try caffeine pills.

I ultimately cut out caffeine completely and have been trying alternative methods of improving my concentration (meditation, etc).

I noticed that while using caffeine, my energy levels would go down pretty hard after the effects wore off, and my tolerance caused it's effect to diminish.

Since quitting cold-turkey, I've noticed more stable energy levels throughout the day (not a surprising conclusion).

'weight gain linked to soda' does not mean that every single person who drinks soda will gain weight, simple as that.

Right. Just wanted to provide an anecdotal perspective (for those that have similar goals as I) showing that it won't necessarily prevent them from reaching those goals.

Repeat after me: the plural of anecdote is not data.

Do you deny that smoking causes lung cancer and premature death? And yet, there are people over 100 years old who have smoked for decades.

With a sample size of one I'd be pretty hesitant to consider this result very significant.

you might've won the genetic lottery. it's hard to imagine though that you haven't been able to find anything on the adverse health effects of sugar.

Do you mind uploading a shirtless pic (no need to include your face)? I ask not because I don't believe you, but because I do and want to see what that looks like in the wild, esp in a community like HN.

I would instead recommending figuring out the right terms to search for. There are lots of examples online of varying % body fat photos: http://bfy.tw/Bpny (somewhat snarky link provided for comedic effect)

Well, maybe diet soda isn't all that bad then.