[michalu]

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.

[Avalaxy]

> 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.

What a bizarre statement. I have no health problems and will always pick the 'zero' variant of any soda, because to me it tastes exactly the same, but minus all the calories.

[hilbert42]

"What a bizarre statement."

Exactly, I don't have diabetes and I always choose the sugar-free ones because of their reduced calories.

I'm not implying that artificial sweeteners are completely safe as I simply don't know—and that's the real problem.

What's damn annoying about these studies is that there are many artificial sweeteners with vastly different chemical structures but generally they're all lumped together. If the gut microbiome is affected and it increases diabetes risk then it's hard to believe that these vastly different chemistries would all have the same effect.

On the other hand, if the body responds badly to the sensation of sweetness then that could explain the result—all other factors being equal.

It seems obvious to me the first job is to determine whether sweetness itself is a factor before anything else.

The 'debate' over artificial sweeteners has been raging for many decades and it's high time it was resolved to avoid confusion. For example where I am the star rating system gives artificially sweetened drinks typically 3.5/5 versus a worse figure of 1–2/5 for those sweetened with sugar.

We need to have faith in officially sanctioned government health warnings.

[stolencode]

> because to me it tastes exactly the same

Mimi: "If you close your eyes."

[bjackman]

Yeah I actively prefer diet drinks. Consuming 40g of sugar felt good when I was 10, but since around puberty it mostly makes my mouth feel sticky and my body feel dehydrated. Often it gives me a headache.

However despite my strong objection to this point in the post I'm still very sympathetic to the idea that this study is bullshit.

(AND I also think drinking sweetened drinks every day is likely a bad idea. I just think this is very hard to prove. I think almost all nutritional claims finer-grained than "eating lots of vegetables seems to be good for you" are probably poorly founded and we are mostly forced to operate on vibes).

[jemmyw]

I'm 42 and I drink 1 diet ginger beer every day. I don't have a problem with sugar (eating chocolate as I write this), I just didn't want the extra calories. I'm in good health otherwise, slightly overweight but 4-6 hours intense sport a week plus walks and runs and some weight lifting at home. Diet soda tastes fine to me. I know people who love the taste of diet coke.

I don't necessarily disagree with you in general, but you're also pulling ideas out of the air. Better to point out the problems with the study than claim that people only drink diet soda for XYZ reason because I think you'd need a whole study to figure out the edges of who drinks what and why.

[mzhaase]

I know plenty of people who drink diet soda who are healthy and have good diets otherwise, because they want to avoid the insulin spike / insulin resistance that comes with high sugar intake.

Claiming such a large study is bogus requires a more statistically founded argument than "I think people who drink diet soda are unhealthy to begin with".

[herbst]

I don't agree. In many countries diet soda is the way more common thing at this point (sugar taxes) ex. Mainland Spain basically every soda except coca cola is based on sweetener instead of sugar.

It turns out it's not the "obvious" better choice they wanted it to be. So looking into it is definitely interesting.

[michalu]

It's a common thing but not 40-60 age group. The demographics of diet soda consumers in Europe is 25-44. The old guys drink it because they have to.

[mort96]

> Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad.

I mean I just don't agree? I'm young-ish (approaching 30), don't have a problem with excessive sugar in my diet, I don't have medical conditions which make sugar a problem, but most of the time when I drink soda I pick one without sugar. I find it tastes fine and I don't exactly want more sugar in my diet.

I'm not saying that your comments about bias introduced by the selection criteria is wrong, I haven't read the study so I don't know if they corrected for it or designed the study in a way which makes it a non-issue. But you seem to have some very strong personal preferences regarding soda, and you've assumed that those personal preferences are universal. They're not.

[throwaway150]

> So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.

What a bogus claim! Plenty of people drink artificially sweetened drinks because they don't want to enjoy a soda but not add calories to their daily consumption! Which world do you live in? Have you even been to cinema lately? I bet every other person orders a diet soda before entering the theatre. I know because I see it happen all the time all around me!

[blenderob]

> 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.

Yes, we don't! And that's perfectly acceptable.

When you're studying a cohort aged 40 to 60, you don't try to reconstruct their exact diet or lifestyle from two decades earlier. You don't rely on their memories from age 20 and treat that as reliable data. It simply isn't.

It's okay not to know what cannot be known, and still move forward with meaningful research. If scientific studies were only allowed to proceed after accounting for every possible confounding variable, then no health research would ever be conducted. None. Zero. Because it's impossible to identify and control for every unknown factor.

What researchers do is control for the known variables, publish their findings, and invite scrutiny. Other researchers then explore new confounding factors, conduct follow-up studies, and expand or refine the conclusions. That's the essence of scientific progress. That's how human knowledge evolves.

It is, frankly, lazy and armchair critiquing to dismiss a study simply because it didn't account for your favorite confounding variable. You know what's not lazy and armchair? Actually conducting research that investigates that variable. And that's when you come to appreciate just how difficult or outright infeasible some of these variables are to measure or control for.

[guelo]

Typical bogus HN comment on a science article. Without reading the paper you somehow assume you're smarter than the researchers and that they didn't control for different population factors.

[michalu]

I read the paper. Have you ever done a study like that? How would you feel if after 14 years it found no surprising result that would warrant some media attention? You adjust then you adjust, Spearman let's try Pearson instead etc.

Actually show me a 10+ year study that found no surprising result.

If the fact that bunch of foundational Alzheimer's studies were found to be faked recently by a guy who profited from them for 20 years and many such cases doesn't make you more realistic then well ... you must have an exceptionally good heart :)

[nektaars]

"Then, the association of sweetened beverage intake with the incidence of type 2 diabetes was assessed using modified Poisson regression and adjusted for lifestyle, obesity, socioeconomic and other confounding factors."

[michalu]

yeah age smoking drinking income what a complete picture