Zero-calorie sweetener linked to heart attack and stroke, study finds

The design appears to be based on the notion that most of the confounders are washing out in the propensity to seek cardiac treatment, which was a precursor for recruitment into the study. I agree this doesn't mitigate all confounding concerns. Given the design where patients are measured at baseline and the endline event measure is measured later, I'd like to see a balance table at the baseline measures.

One possible pitch: I'm also not sure whether the circulating blood levels of this chemical are actually connected to consumption of the sweetener. You could imagine a world where two individuals who have identical consumption of the sweetener but different free-circulating levels of the chemical, the higher levels of the chemical could be an indication of other confounding health issues causing malabsorption.

I am not a biologist or doctor and don't know anything about sweeteners or any of the mechanisms that may or may not play a role here, just commenting on design.

Because multiple colinear variables like that would make the confidence intervals blow up because not every person in the study is obese much less the same degree of obese, and adjusting for colinearity is a basic part of data modeling. Just like how smokers may partake in worse health practices in general, but not every smoker does, and not every smoker is unhealthy to the same degree, thus you can find an effect across all smokers, like O2 deficiency, even a health nut smoker.

Nah they cram zero calorie sweeteners in more and more foods these days just to fuck with the calorie totals and addictively of food without mentioning it blatantly.

Here's one example. Thomas, the english muffin brand, their completely plain whole wheat muffins with no marketing of of the sweeteners lists sucralose in it's ingredients. It made me go WTF.

Basically, don't trust processed foods at face value, shit, don't even trust restaurant foods because many of them just order from Sysco that offers them pre-made junk at wholesale prices.

I have neither cardiac disease nor diabetes and am at the lower end of a normal weight range, yet I'm at risk of stroke for other inherited reasons. I consume ungodly amounts of zero-calorie sweetener because I want to stay at my current weight despite my sweet tooth. This conclusion is distressing to say the least :(

And that CNN page semi-randomly embeds a video about an unrelated study that claimed to show an elevated risk of stroke in obese women who drank more than two diet sodas a day...

... everywhere, all at once.

What? I was on keto for months and consumed copious amounts of these. No spike for MONTHS on end. Does your statement come with qualifiers or is that just straight up misinformation?

They don't cause insulin spikes to nearly the same degree. Their insulin spikes are much smaller, almost negligible.

So no sugar and no sweeteners. What's left?