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Comment by adamhearn | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the average consumer of diet sweeteners is already likely to be overweight, diabetic, or have other ailments. This article seems highly sensationalized. For the average person, the risk of sugar impacting blood glucose levels seems far riskier than any side effect of a NSS

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As a former twitter entertainer once said, "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."

I suppose we could do a nation-wide experiment by insisting that the sugar water vendors use only NSS for a year; but that would probably result in the overthrow of the government.

> As a former twitter entertainer once said, "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."

There's a lot he hasn't seen in this world. Doesn't mean those things don't happen.

Yeah, and also not even an insightful joke. I mean, isn't Taylor Swift, notable thin pretty human, a famous Diet Coke fan? That's just the first person who comes to mind. Also half the people I know, as well.

That tweet doesn't reflect my experience at all actually, in Europe at least. I know it's an anecdote but I know many fit people that drink frequently Diet Coke or Coke Zero. Is this a US thing?

Coke Zero is much more common as an Everyman drink in Europe apparently, perhaps because of less sugar insensitivity.

In the USA a large size combo meal with a diet coke coming in at 1500+ calories is a meme based in reality.

The fattest person I ever worked with used to drink 4-8 litres of diet coke a day. When I met him again two years later, his weight was normal. Asked how he did it, he just stopped drinking the diet coke.

NNSs trigger the same insulin/fat storage mechanism as sugar, but they arent absorbed, and stay on the blood longer, leading to insulin resistance.

Please point us to some science about this, because of that is true, it’s a pretty big deal.

It's anecdata but I've seen similar - however, it could also be explained by "not taking weight loss seriously if all you do is switch to gallons of diet drink".

And for lots of sodas, caffeine plays, too. It's hard to factor out the various issues that could also be present.

There's lots. Here's one that tested sugar+sweetener, note the decrease in insulin clearance when sweeteners are consumed, vs just sugar:

sucralose ingestion caused 1) a greater incremental increase in peak plasma glucose concentrations (4.2 ± 0.2 vs. 4.8 ± 0.3 mmol/L; P = 0.03), 2) a 20 ± 8% greater incremental increase in insulin area under the curve (AUC) (P < 0.03), 3) a 22 ± 7% greater peak insulin secretion rate (P < 0.02), 4) a 7 ± 4% decrease in insulin clearance (P = 0.04), and 5) a 23 ± 20% decrease in SI (P = 0.01).

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/36/9/2530/37872/Su...

Also interested to see if there's any proof of this. I know, anecdotally as an obese man, that whether I cut out diet soda or not doesn't seem to make a difference. Maybe I'm not doing it for long enough?

Are you drinking 4-8 litres a day?

Nowhere near that much.

Good. The dose makes the poison.

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