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Comment by m4ck_ | Hacker News Reader

It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.

All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)

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Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.

That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.

I lost a lot of weight using diet soda in the evenings as an alternative to snacking.

It turns out, drinking a lot of what is essentially just water, is actually pretty healthy.

Except that four cans of soda is not much more than a single 44oz soda fountain drink at QT and folk gobble down those often 3 times a day.

44oz? That's huge. I couldn't imagine drinking one of those a day.

The small Coke Zero cans make it tough to have just one. I typically will have 2 small cans with a meal which feels roughly equivalent to one regular sized can

I think most things aren't great if you have them in quantity. Variety in your diet is a good thing

> dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day

In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be

Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.

That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.

There is no meaningful insulin response to noncaloric sweeteners.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7014832/

Did you read this paper? Do you really think this is good evidence for the claim? I'd love to hear why.

I could give a fulsome critique of it but I think the simpler thing to say just to kick this off is that I could give you a PubMed cite to back basically any claim, true or otherwise.

You really need a large volume of repeated results by different groups doing the experiment/research so you get the proper regression to the mean. Individual papers are more important at saying "here is something interesting that others should also check out".

Right, but what about this particular paper? What do you think of it?

Would this insulin response be detectable with a CGM?

The answer is no - sucralose, saccharin, aspartame; it doesn’t matter, diet soda and artificial sweetener does not affect blood sugar in any detectable way, at least for me. It was one of the first things I checked when I got my CGM.

“It will crash your blood sugar” and “it will spike your blood sugar despite not having carbohydrates” are myths.

CGMs don't monitor insulin. They also don't monitor glycogen mobilization or fructose for that matter.

See: Cephalic Phase Insulin Response

You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).

Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?

If people didn't make their decisions based on ads they wouldn't exist.

For those who want diet cola without aspartame, there's an alternative:

https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack

If you’re concerned with aspartame, why wouldn’t you be concerned about sucralose and acesulfame potassium?

If someone feels aspartame makes them feel bad, they can try something else, and see how it makes them feel.

That was the point behind my comment.

I want to say a "well duh", but it seems it's not common sense that too much of anything is generally bad for someone.

(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)

Health outcomes of lottery winners suggest it's not great.

Why not?

Bias?

The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.

People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.

This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.

Is it really so "depraved" if they are simply smart enough to notice what generates revenue and acting on that?

Of course we could argue that making money off people is wrong, but I think that is a losing battle in a capitalist society, which is most of the world right now from what I understand.

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