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I am trying to visualize how they would even determine this correlation, much less honor it with statistical significance. Must have been a slow day at the journals.
I am trying to visualize how they would even determine this correlation....
The linked article links to both journals. Each journal article begins by explaining the methodology.
Man, I forgot to stop drinking those diet sodas. What's happening to me?
But, sugar and aspartame are fat-free!
lol
10
How about "You Only Live Once! So you should enjoy it! With your USFedGov recommendation of ten-12 servings of Frosted Flakes per day, and Diet Coke. I can't live without my Diet Coke, it's so gross"
Anyone who doesn't know that soda (sugar or fake sugar variety) is bad for you one way or another is living under a rock. Added sugar and sugar water is clearly an addiction with little if any positive benefit outside of prolonged (more than 3 hour) physical exertion. I'm ambivalent on the soda tax topic, but people should know that it's bad for you for various reasons.
But, sugar and aspartame are fat-free!
Nobody ever said that fat was the only thing in the world that was bad for you and that all fat free things are good for you. If all you got out of the nutritional information of the 70s was 'fat is bad' you need to take a deeper look at information in general.
New studies have shown that the sweetener in diet drinks does vast damage to your gut microbiome, which contributes greatly to depression, low energy, cancers, and ironically weight gain.
If you had to make a choice between regular and Diet Coke, go with the regular. Your gut bacteria, upon which you unwittingly rely for many things including a healthy immune system, will thank you.
Nobody ever said that fat was the only thing in the world that was bad for you and that all fat free things are good for you. I
Way to totally miss a brilliant ironic joke from carrieon!
weight gain.
I have seen studies saying diet soda doesn't help with weight management compared to sugary soda. Some attribute the effect to excessive sweetness causing a rush that triggers the brain to crave more, like descriptions of certain drugs (e.g. crack cocaine). Your attribution to the microbiome makes a lot of sense, but there are other possible explanations. Regardless of the precise mechanism, the bottom line remains: diet soda doesn't work compared to sugary soda, and both are correlated with adverse consequences.
Anyone who doesn't know that soda (sugar or fake sugar variety) is bad for you one way or another is living under a rock.
The thread on Wikipedia problems has comments linking how the sugary beverage industry has financed fake studies and fake news headlines to discredit that information, including on Wikipedia. Most Americans are living under a constant barrage of fake news, including deliberate distortions to serve the industries that profit from them. Margarine made from subsidized hydrogenated corn oil was advertised on TV as healthy for years after it had been proven unhealthy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Vast legions of "elite" salaries depend on not understanding a great many things, including especially areas where ignorance or misinformation can yield potentially infinite subsidies to entrenched industries. From the Gulf of Tonkin to Iraqi WMD to Syria, accurate information remains available, but gets buried like individual needles in giant haystacks under a constant blizzard of revenue maximizing fakery. The average person cannot realistically dig through all the snowdrifts and sort through all the haystacks to find all the needles; the game works by fooling enough of the people enough of the time to monetize them.
Margarine made from subsidized hydrogenated corn oil was advertised on TV as healthy for years after it had been proven unhealthy.
Big Culprit in the fake news machine:
The Center for Science in the Public Interest. They were one of the pressure groups trying to get Trans Fat (Margarine and other partially hydrogenated veggie oils) to replace far healthier beef tallow and coconut oil in the 1980s.
http://www.academia.edu/1429225/The_Perfect_Solution_How_Trans_Fats_Became_the_Healthy_Replacement_for_Saturated_Fats
Vegetarians played a big role promoting Margarine.
There are healthier sugar substitutes such as stevia and the - more popular in Europe - sugar alcohols (xylitol, mannitol, sorbitol etc.), but esp. the long-standing sugar alcohols have been demonized and pushed out by the US big food lobby so they can push their aspartame, acesulfame and sucralose crap. In any case a high fat, medium protein and low carb diet is now deemed superior to pretty much all other diets.
In any case a high fat, medium protein and low carb diet is now deemed superior to pretty much all other diets.
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Better late than never.
The cigarette industry, animal food industry, processed food industry, and fossil fuel industry have also all published shitty intentionally misleading articles. The alcohol industry no doubt does it too. The popular media doesn't employ enough scientists and statisticians to interpret nutrition studies correctly, and that is a shame. Still, nobody has ever told me that a coke was good for you. At best, they might have said it was empty calories, which itself is bad. Also, no doctor that I know of who specializes in nutrition advocates drinking soda. The high carb / low fat doctors all say not to do that. Obviously, the low carb people do as well.
The only nutritional advice that I'm aware of in the last 100 years that recommended sugar was the kempner diet. It actually could be used to defend drinking liquid sugary calories. By providing 2000 cals/day of white rice, sugar, fruit, fruit juice, and some vitamins and minerals, his diet was the only cure for hypertension at the time.
I think that if people think that soda is not bad for you (neutral), then they are willing dupes.
Inspired by Tom Brady(I hope I never have to say that again), I've actually started cutting all added sugar from my diet. You know how many things have added sugar!!
Most cereals
mayonnaise
salad dressing
chips
bread
etc, etc...
But yes, added sugar has absolutely zero nutritional value.
"excess sugar -- especially the fructose in sugary drinks -- might damage your brain [and] people who drank diet soda daily were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia when compared to those who did not.
***
[T]hese findings, which appear separately in the journals Alzheimer's & Dementia and Stroke, demonstrate correlation but not cause-and-effect. While researchers caution against over-consuming either diet soda or sugary drinks, more research is needed to determine how -- or if -- these drinks actually damage the brain, and how much damage may be caused by underlying vascular disease or diabetes."
Both studies involved thousands of people. Many say "the gold standard" in research is (at least theoretically) a double-blind, placebo controlled trial. In practice, too many of those studies tend to suffer from small sample sizes, short duration, and publication bias, rendering them meaningless: too many are PhRMA-driven pseudo-scientific marketing rather than actually scientific information. A large study showing correlation may in fact be more reliable than a small study trying to prove cause and effect, especially when assessing risk factors that accumulate over decades (e.g. smoking).