These things are all so confusingly written I can't help but feel it's a pro sugar conspiracy.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, drinking sugary beverages makes you fat, and then you only have a 23% higher chance of diabetes than an equally fat person who doesn't drink sugary sodas.
While drinking artificially sweetened drinks doesn't make you fat but does make you more likely to have diabetes than an equally non-fat person.
So the obvious but unanswered question seems to be, would you rather be fat and have the absolute risk of diabetes 23% more than that standard fat person plus other health problems of being overweight, or be thinner and have a 43% more chance of diabetes than a thinner person? What's the actual risk, not percentage increase compared with different baselines?
Answering that straightforward question would let you know "is it better to drink artificial sweetened than sugary beverages" that always seems to go unanswered in these studies while heavily implying that it's worse than sugar, presumably because they're funded by big sugar.
I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. The diet I went onto more or less cut out anything sweet. It's surprising how quickly I became sensitive to sweetness and now I just don't want it. And blood tests show the diet worked. Life goes on without sweet!
Typical bogus study. This shows exactly what's the problem with most of these studies.
So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60.
The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.
So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.
People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem.
Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.
And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US.
So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result.
Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease.
Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation.
Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.
This is actually a solid study, despite what the current top comment might suggest. It's frustrating how frequently shallow, dismissive takes that don't engage with the substance of a paper rise to the top on HN. I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks.
If you're going to criticize a study, the least you can do is read it carefully and refer to specific sections and quote specific excerpts where you believe the authors went wrong. Anything less is just noise.
Can we stop publishing diet studies that use self-reported diet journals/questionnaires as the method for controlling variables? They are completely unreliable and invalidate anything they touch.
In this particular study it is even worse, because there is very likely to be confounding reporting related to what is being tested, i.e. the type of person who specifically seeks out diet soda is probably going to report their other intake in a different way to the person who YOLOs on sugar.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] threadSoda is poison.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, drinking sugary beverages makes you fat, and then you only have a 23% higher chance of diabetes than an equally fat person who doesn't drink sugary sodas.
While drinking artificially sweetened drinks doesn't make you fat but does make you more likely to have diabetes than an equally non-fat person.
So the obvious but unanswered question seems to be, would you rather be fat and have the absolute risk of diabetes 23% more than that standard fat person plus other health problems of being overweight, or be thinner and have a 43% more chance of diabetes than a thinner person? What's the actual risk, not percentage increase compared with different baselines?
Answering that straightforward question would let you know "is it better to drink artificial sweetened than sugary beverages" that always seems to go unanswered in these studies while heavily implying that it's worse than sugar, presumably because they're funded by big sugar.
So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60.
The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.
So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.
People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem.
Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.
And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US.
So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result.
Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease.
Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation.
Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.
This is actually a solid study, despite what the current top comment might suggest. It's frustrating how frequently shallow, dismissive takes that don't engage with the substance of a paper rise to the top on HN. I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks.
If you're going to criticize a study, the least you can do is read it carefully and refer to specific sections and quote specific excerpts where you believe the authors went wrong. Anything less is just noise.
In this particular study it is even worse, because there is very likely to be confounding reporting related to what is being tested, i.e. the type of person who specifically seeks out diet soda is probably going to report their other intake in a different way to the person who YOLOs on sugar.