11 ms·
Two or more diet beverages a day linked to high risk of stroke, heart attacks
- rcdmd 8y agoThe linked CNN article is a very poor summary. It doesn't even include a proper citation, and the link to the study isn't directing to the one being discussed!? Come on, CNN. I recommend reading the editorial in Stroke instead: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.119.024456 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.119.02... And you can get the article here if you have access to Stroke: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aledthemathguy 8y agotl:dr, is it the artificial sweeteners?
- aledthemathguy 8y agook, update. YES. These companies will sell your life for a dollar.
- PavlikPaja 8y agoIt's the phosphoric acid, which binds and prevents the absorption of other micronutrients.
- analog31 8y agoSo far as I know, regular soda also has phosphoric acid.
- PavlikPaja 8y agoYes.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoTL;DR: it's an association, not a causal relationship. It may as well be that people more prone to stroke or heart attacks pick up diet beverages.
- Waterluvian 8y ago"...16% more likely to die from any cause than women who drank diet beverages less than once a week or not at all." Doesn't this suggest that they actually failed to control for lifestyle effects?
- mattkrause 8y agoAll-cause mortality is a pretty common way to look at “side-effects”, especially when it is not clear exactly what they might be. These do need to be interpreted carefully though, lest you end up concluding that a drug increases your odds of getting into a car crash or something. There could be a causal link—maybe the drug causes drowsiness or affects vision—but it could also be noise....5% of the time happens 5% of the time, after all!
- njitram 8y agoThe article states that the research was done only for women above 50, and that it is observational, does not show cause and effect, so not sure how to interpret this.
- shhehebehdh 8y agoYou should interpret it the same way you interpret any other study that demonstrates only correlation and fails to control for obvious confounders.
- lowken10 8y agoI think I'll go grab a diet coke.
- lolc 8y agoWhy not get the one with the sugar? The data on that one are clear. No worrying about whether it's bad for you.
- joebluemoon 8y agoBecause natural is uncool. The most "educated" ones promote artificial (because they created it, duh!) and the hippies and ludites promote "natural". See how human psychology works? If you want to be cool on the internet, you DO NOT go against science. (Except of course, when the science is disproving science). It's that simple. Carefully observe this for a while on similar subjects and make yor own conclusion abput what im saying. Good luck! Im gonna go take mud bath now.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoCoke and similar drinks are q problem for patients with renal failure its the phosphor. You normally take phosphor binders (Renagel) as well as giving up coke - god only knows what costs in the states it cost the nhs about £1000 for 2 months supply for me.
- lolc 8y agoI wonder whether even if there is a causal link, the diet version will still be healthier (for low values of healthy) than the sugary version. I tend to think so. I would assume the people most likely to drink diet beverages do so to wean themselves off of sugary drinks. That's one of the first steps in getting towards a healthier lifestyle. The article notes this too. A mystery to me is why they haven't asked about consumption of sugary drinks at the same time. That would have allowed to get much more interesting correlations.
- zzzcpan 8y ago> A mystery to me is why they haven't asked about consumption of sugary drinks at the same time. Obviously because sugary drinks manufacturers are paying for the article and the "study".
- owlninja 8y agoLink?
- swah 8y agoBut Coke sells Coke, Diet Coke, juices and bottled water. What difference does it make to them?
- Matticus_Rex 8y agoThey're more dominant in cola than they are in orange juice.
- deegles 8y agoI had a coworker who insisted diet sodas were worse for you than regular sodas. I just don't understand how people reach that kind of conclusion.
- close04 8y agoI guess it's because other scientists and studies say low-calorie sweeteners can lead to weight gain or increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and in lab experiments aspartame exposure lead to increased lymphoma and leukemia. It's not that obvious which study is right and which maybe had a flawed methodology, or which is the result of correlation rather than causation. A random example that does not definitively settle anything but is enough to make you keep asking the question [0]. And one common sense argument is that many people consume way more diet sodas than they would regular ones. Since they have no sugar and almost no calories the assumption is that there is no danger to consume more of them, they are "healthy". Since artificial sweeteners have their own sets of risks in mechanisms that are perhaps even less understood, suddenly this assumption is that more dangerous. It could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2008.284 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2008.28...
- orzig 8y agoPositive: The article links to a study Positive: The study is open access! Negative: The study is, to the best of my few minutes of ToC reading and Ctrl-F-ing, _entirely_ unrelated to soft drinks or sweeteners Am I missing something? In either event, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, I suppose
- spicedune 8y agosame, what gives?
- lucozade 8y agoI think they linked to the wrong study. I believe it's here: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100 Unfortunately, it's locked. So I'm going to go for 0.5 out of 3 on this one.
- bluedino 8y agoI’ve never seen a skinny person regularly drink Diet Coke/Pepsi Diet carbonated drinks just make me gassy. I’d rather have the sugar from a regular Coke and just not drink one every day, or multiple ones per day. I have co-workers that drink 6-8 per day. I find the “tiny” cans which are only 7.5 are about the perfect size. 3-4 drinks, only 80 cslories, a small bump of sugar...if I drink a 20oz bottle I usually can’t finish it as it’s way too sweet. Turns out the original size of a bottle of Coke was 6.5 ounces.
- plouffy 8y agohttps://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/257552283850653696?lang=en https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/25755228385065369...
- rsynnott 8y agoThat feels like just anecdotal evidence from one fat diet coke drinker.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI drink Coke Zero all the time, and I have been described as skinny by at least one ultrasound technician. I think you might just not be noticing when non-fat people drink it.
- dane-pgp 8y agohttps://www.instagram.com/matpatgt/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/matpatgt/?hl=en > Creator of Film Theory, Game Theory, and co-host of GTLive. Diet Coke addict. Owner of a cat and a baby. I don't know if he counts as "a skinny person", but he's not exactly a FatPat either.
- zzzcpan 8y ago> I’d rather have the sugar from a regular Coke I guess this is what the article tries to achieve. Just PR to steer you to more unhealthy consumption. Safe choice here was always to simply avoid sweet beverages altogether, and not just Coke, all the juices too.
- S_A_P 8y agoThe problem is that diet sodas are seen as a cheat that allows a person to eat more calories than they should. This usually is linked to people with poor nutrition habits. Those same people are probably more likely to stroke out or have a heart attack.
- lucozade 8y agoThat's unlikely to be the basis for this result as they controlled for weight. In fact, of their cohort, if the person was obese and drank high quantities of diet drinks, their risk of strokes shot up even further.
- bitexploder 8y agoI would still guess it has little to do with the diet soda itself and everything about the persons habits, which led them to drink diet soda twice or more per day. It seems unlikely artificial sweetener can have this impact. If it can, that is definitely interesting and the mechanism should be discovered.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoI concluded a some time ago that soda drinks weren't adding a lot of value for me at all. And I heard some people claim that the artificial sugars actually are not that great for you. 1) they teach your body that sweet stuff has no nutrition, which then becomes a problem when you actually eat sweet stuff 2) sweeteners like aspartame build up in your liver and fat deposits, which may or may not have long term impact. 3) artificial sweeteners can cause issues with your gut bacteria/cause some irritation. All of that may or may not be true and I never really experienced any of that. I used to just order a cola light/zero/diet in restaurants but it was more of a habit than something I actually particularly enjoyed. These days I usually go for water, tea, or coffee. Small change, probably a lot healthier, and I actually enjoy drinking it.
- drankula3 8y agoOn 2 and 3: aspartame metabolizes into the amino acid phenylalanine, a precursor to dopamine and epinephrine[0]. In normal people, breakdown of the upstream neurotransmitters increase when phenylalanine increases, meaning there are no negative effects from it's consumption. It does not store in the liver. There are some diseases that involve a malfunction in phenylalanine processing, like phenylketonuria[1] and hyperphenylalaninemia[2]. It would not surprise me a bit if people with subclinical forms of hyperphenylalaninemia self-medicate with diet soda to feel better, particularly energy drinks that come with other things that aid in dopamine synthesis. Disfunction in dopamine synthesis often affects other things like NO synthesis, affecting blood pressure and inflammation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame?wprov=sfla1 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria?wprov=sfla1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphenylalaninemia?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphenylalaninemia?wprov=sf... Edit: changed serotonin to epinephrine, as phenylalanine is not a precursor to serotonin.
- ticviking 8y agoThis may well be the most interesting hypothesis for why I rely so heavily on these I've ever seen. Are you aware of any research on this idea?
- franky_g 8y agoIll just have one then....
- floathub 8y agoIt is entirely unclear how any controls were implemented. They say "after controlling for lifestyle factors" but do not say which factors nor how they controlled for them. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that diet beverages are simply a proxy for some other factor. Maybe even just weight. To wit: "This association may also be contributed to by rising blood pressure and sugars that were not yet diagnosed as hypertension or diabetes but warranted weight loss," thus leading the women in the study to take up diet beverages, said Dr. Keri Peterson, medical advisor for the Calorie Research Council, an international association representing the low- and reduced-calorie food and beverage industry. This possibility makes the implication that there is some causal relationship pretty tenuous. This question: "What is it about these diet drinks?" asked lead study author Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani ... might well be answered with, "nothing at all actually". (edited for quotes because I keep forgetting this is not markdown)
- toasterlovin 8y agoWelcome to all of nutrition science. As a field it is characterized by a dearth of studies which are actually capable of demonstrating causation. Almost every study is simply a measurement of correlation. And then you get these moronic interpretations of the studies, sometimes by the study authors themselves.
- dilap 8y agoI dunno, 1.23 increase in risk is tiny; seems likely that it's just lifestyle stuff (which you can try to control for a bit, but you can't know every single choice a diet soda drinker is making -- quite likely an overall less healthy lifestyle). Compare this to e.g. 20x lung cancer incidence for smokers, where even w/ observational data, you can be pretty sure there's a causal relationship. Maybe do some RCTs giving diet soda to animals or something and see what happens. And look into the chemistry to see what the mechanism might be... (That said, probably prudent not to go too crazy with diet soda, or any other novel ingredients.)
- twistedanimator 8y agoI didn't RTFA, but I'm going to chime in anyways. I think if you're drinking 2 or more diet beverages a day, you probably have a "fuck it" attitude when it comes to your health. And that attitude probably pervades the rest of your decisions you make in your life. Even the people I know who couldn't care less about their health all talk about not wanting to get cancer from drinking diet sodas, especially those containing aspartame.
- joebluemoon 8y agoI noticed a pattern on sites where the userbase is more "science savvy" types, concencus os always to discredit anything against manmade like gmo and now this. Also, the entire perception on food in the west is so upside down its like the darkages here in that regard. Its fascinating to witness.
- joebluemoon 8y agoWhy do westerners treat everything as a cause and effect machine? Its such an amateur view. This is a great illustratin of "intellect" vs "intelligence". The entire western societies are based on "intellect". Also, don't consume fake anything ;)